


Enemy Mine

by Rassaku



Category: Dresden Files - Jim Butcher
Genre: Lots of plot, M/M, everyone in the cast gets a cameo
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-10-07
Updated: 2011-10-11
Packaged: 2017-10-24 09:48:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 16
Words: 145,374
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/262093
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rassaku/pseuds/Rassaku
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Harry gets invited on a date by everyone’s favorite mob boss, and <i>then</i> things get weird.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This story follows canon through _Small Favor_ and makes extensive use of plot developments from that and all preceding books. If you haven’t read it yet, there are going to be lots of spoilers, and also things that just make no sense. I break with canon before _Turn Coat_ , but I did read it and there are some things in this that deliberately echo events in TC. Have not yet read _Changes_ , so if anything looks like a spoiler, it’s entirely coincidental. You may spot a few inconsistencies with the Dresden Files canon in later chapters; some of these were intentional tweaks to make it meet my needs, but I’m sure there are some other things that are just mistakes.

It seems like this story should kick off with “I never did get the hang of Thursdays,” or something like that, but truth is, I kind of like Thursdays. The week’s winding down, that’s when you start looking around to make plans for the weekend. Finding yourself a hot date for Friday, and all that.

Granted, it had been longer than I cared to admit since I’d had a hot date, and my Friday evening plans involved Mouse—my extremely ironically named dog—and a Frisbee at the park. A little well-deserved R&R after my last case, which wasn’t quite as traumatic as some of my, shall we say, _adventures_ have been, but still pretty damn gross. Let’s just say I won’t be eating quiche again anytime soon.

In any case, I’d just finished eating lunch at my desk, instant ramen for the third day in a row, when the phone rang.

“Dresden,” I answered on the second ring. No point in volunteering excess information, since anyone calling me ought to know what they’re looking for.

“Mr. Dresden,” came the smooth, pleased voice that I had come to know all too well, much to my chagrin. It spoke volumes that Marcone didn’t even bother to state his name, confident that I would recognize him. “And how are you doing this fine afternoon?”

The tempting answer was, _It_ _ **was**_ _fine, until you called_ , but I try not to take my dialogue from daytime TV, or fifth graders. I smothered a sigh, crumpling the empty ramen cup and chucking it ineffectually at the wastebasket.

“Doing great,” I replied caustically. “Only one call from a known crime lord, I’m still well under quota.”

I could hear him chuckle. “I suppose I could call back if you’d like to inflate your numbers, but I’d rather not.” Requisite bickering dispensed with, his tone turned businesslike. “Mr. Dresden, I was wondering if I could have a few hours of your time tomorrow evening.”

Huh. I supposed it was a comfort to know that I wasn’t the only one flying solo on Friday nights, though Gentleman John putting in overtime wasn’t the company I would have chosen.

“No rest for the wicked, I see,” I taunted, knowing he wouldn’t rise to the bait. I bobbed twice in my office chair, wishing I could tell him to take a long walk off a short pier. However, I was also uncomfortably aware that when supernatural trouble went down in this city, he was all too often in the thick of it and for reasons of his own, would seldom tell me straight-out. So I asked bluntly, “What for?”

“My plans are not set in stone, but I was considering steak at Morton’s and then a show at the Siskel Film Center. Pending your approval, of course.”

I blinked. Boggled at it. Replayed it, checking for sarcasm. Wondered briefly if he’d called the wrong number. Then said, intelligently, “What?”

“Dinner and a movie, Mr. Dresden, I believe it’s traditional. And I have it on good authority that you are a traditional sort of man.” He was smirking so broadly I could _hear_ it, which meant anyone else would have been rolling on the floor and howling with laughter.

“Are—” I began, then stopped, trying to think of a better way to phrase it, vaguely offended that he was even making me ask this ridiculous question to start with. Since there wasn’t one, the best I could do was to try to sound appalled instead of confused as heck, which was kind of a losing effort. “Are you asking me out on a _date?_ ” I demanded.

 _Now_ he was laughing, damn him, and probably taping this conversation so he could use it to laugh himself to sleep at night. “And when anyone asks what I see in you, I shall be sure to tell them that it was your keen deductive reasoning that won my heart.”

I took the phone away from my ear and held it about six inches off, as though that could give me some objective distance from a conversation that was rapidly sinking into the Twilight Zone. He was still laughing when I put it back to my ear.

“Okay, what’s really going on?” I asked, trying for businesslike.

“I invited you on a date. The ball is now in your court, and I await your answer with bated breath.”

“Is this about business that you don’t want to discuss over the phone?”

That would be like him, to psych me out into thinking it was a _date_ date and then just happen to mention that, oh by the way, I hear that there are vampires in town making a bid for world domination, or something to that effect.

“I assure you, it is not.” He wasn’t laughing anymore, and his voice had neatly slipped back into unreadability.

I stared hard at the pencil holder on my desk and winced when a ballpoint pen exploded with an inky pop. “Are you being held hostage?” I offered. “If they have a gun or something on you, just answer with yes or no.”

There was a huff of laughter that was the verbal equivalent of an eye-roll. “No, there is nobody holding a gun on me.”

“Are you possessed?”

“ _No._ ”

“Have you eaten or drunk anything strange in the past twenty-four hours—”

“No, I have not, and Mr. Dresden, diverting as it is to play twenty questions with you, I _do_ have other business to attend to,” he cut me off, finally sounding a touch exasperated. “Dinner and a movie tomorrow night, yes or no?”

I blinked and answered automatically. “Ah—no.”

“That’s a shame,” he said mildly. “It’s generally agreed that Morton’s serves the best prime steak in Chicago, and I understand your finances have been tight recently—”

Son of a _bitch_. Because steak, as my unsatisfied stomach took that opportunity to loudly remind me, beat cup noodles by a landslide.

“—but I’m sure you have your reasons and I won’t take up any more of your time. Good day, Mr. Dresden.”

He hung up, politely, but it took another ten seconds before the silence penetrated and I replaced the headset.

“Huh,” I ventured aloud, tipping back in my chair. Then again, for good measure and because I really couldn’t think of anything else, “Huh.”

 

Once I recovered from my bemusement, the first thing I did was call my pet skull, Bob. Not with a telephone, of course—convenient as that might have been, with a wizard on one end and a spirit of air and intellect on the other, we’d be lucky not to fry Chicago’s entire switchboard. I pushed aside the lost property case that I should have been working on and rigged up a quick and dirty little contact spell with paper clips, a salt shaker, and a half-empty bottle of mouthwash.

“This is Bob’s phone sex hotline, what’s your _pllllleasure_?” he answered when the spell connected.

“Glad to see you’ve found your own way of paying the rent,” I said.

“Well, some people haven’t been pulling their weight recently.”

“Let me guess, you give great head.”

“Har, har. I take it from your lack of theatrics that you’re not calling with any great emergency?”

“Not a great one, no,” I acknowledged. “Though this might qualify as a minor emergency.”

Bob waited. I suddenly found it much harder to get the words out than I had anticipated. Eventually I managed to spill it.

“Marcone asked me out. On a _date._ ”

“Ohohoho,” Bob chortled. “And now you’re worried because you don’t own a single article of clothing that would pass muster with everyone’s favorite crime lord.”

“I— _no!_ That’s not the problem. I turned him down!”

“Uh… boss?” Bob said dubiously. “I hate to point out the obvious, but I haven’t noticed you getting any better offers lately.”

“That is totally not the point. Also, none of your business.”

“Except that you just called me,” Bob pointed out.

“I was looking for… uh…” I made some vague hand gestures, which were even less help than usual, given that Bob couldn’t see them. “I don’t know, a professional opinion on the matter.”

“Professional opinion?” Bob guffawed. “He wants to _do_ you. I could have told you that since the incident with the werewolves.”

“He does not—wait, what?” I could remember the ‘incident with the werewolves,’ as he put it, quite clearly, but I didn’t see how that lent any credence to his assertion that Marcone wanted to ‘do me.’

Bob heaved a sigh, which was usually his way to let me know that I was a moron for not already knowing what he was about to tell me. “He wanted you _alive_ , right? He wanted them to turn you over to his custody before you were mangled beyond recognition, right?”

“That is _not_ evidence of any deep-seated affection,” I protested. “You may also remember that I told you he was actively trying to recruit me back then. He didn’t want me dead because he wanted me working for him.”

Bob just cackled. “Ah, padawan, you have much still to learn.”

“What? No—there are _many_ people,  dozens perhaps, who don’t want to kill me, and past evidence would indicate that it’s not because they want to ‘do’ me.”

“Fine, fine,” Bob conceded, in a skeptical tone that clearly said he was humoring me. “I’ll defer to your superior judgment on this matter, though you might want to ask yourself one thing…”

“What?”

When he spoke, I could hear the leer. “When’s the last time I was wrong?”

I hung up on him.

Drummed my fingers on the desk.

Then picked up the phone and dialed Murphy’s cell, feeling uncomfortably like a teenage girl who, after being asked out by the quarterback, proceeds to call up all her friends (in my case, all two of them) and spread the word. In point of fact though, I was calling around to make sure that rivers were still running downhill and there hadn’t been any scattered showers of frogs lately.

“Sergeant Murphy, Special Investigations,” Murphy rapped out after barely a ring and a half. You know how sometimes you can tell, from the first word out of their mouth, that you called at a bad time? Yeah, I was getting that now.

“Uh… hi, Murph,” I said, wondering if it might have been the better part of valor to ask if her refrigerator was running, and then hang up pronto.

“Harry,” she said in confirmation, her voice neutral and businesslike. Behind her I could hear the background noise that accompanies phone calls, clatter and human voices and what sounded like an intercom somewhere. “I take it from your impeccable timing that this mess is a spillover from your side of the fence?”

“I—what?” I stammered, caught off-guard. “What happened?”

“Some sort of freaky mass hypnosis, or that’s the current working theory—about thirty or forty people hanging out on North Avenue Beach just up and tried to drown themselves. All of a sudden, these people dropped what they were doing and walked straight into the lake. Fortunately there were enough bystanders that most of them got hauled out before they could finish the job, but we’ve got four dead, seven on life support with probable brain damage, and none of the survivors have any memory of walking into the water.”

“Sounds like a kelpie,” I suggested, and my mouth was open to continue when I suddenly realized that it didn’t.

“What’s a kelpie?” Murphy prompted at my silence.

I frowned and tapped out a staccato rhythm on the table. “A monster from faerie, they lure their victims into water and then eat them. But I don’t think that would account for the memory loss—I’ve never heard of them being able to do that before, though I guess I could be wrong. I’d have to ask someone.”

“I see,” she replied, in the tone of voice that meant she was taking notes. “Well, I was going to call and get your opinion as soon as some of the chaos died down here, but right now I’m still dripping lake water onto the hospital floor. I won’t ask how you found out so fast, but if we’re going to be seeing more incidents like this, tell me now.”

“Uh, well actually I was calling about something else—I didn’t know about North Avenue Beach turning into a suicide club until you just told me.” Though I had no doubt the news would have reached me in short order, whether I heard it from Murphy or not.

“You didn’t?” she echoed with some surprise. “Then why’d you call?”

Crap. This kelpie thing had succeeded in distracting me from my original purpose, and now I felt it was a wee bit juvenile to continue harping about having been propositioned by a mob boss, when Murphy was sodden and tired and probably dealing with the unenviable cop guilt of not having been able to save everyone.

“Look, it’s nothing important,” I said, trying to sound considerate and soothing but just coming off as uncomfortable and a little guilty. “Nothing that can’t wait until later.”

“Harry,” she said, and I didn’t need to be looking at her to know the flat, sardonic look she was leveling at me now. “You’ve seen enough predictable thrillers to know that the guy who says that _always_ has the critical information, and moreover, after those ironic last words he _always_ gets offed before he can tell anyone. Out with it.”

“No really,” I insisted, a little desperately. “It’s _really_ not important. A waste of your time and mine. Look, you’re probably exhausted, you should grab a shower and a bite to eat and—”

“ _Harry_ ,” she growled.

“Marconeaskedmeoutonadate.”

The silence on her end would have been ringing, if not for the hospital background noise that picked up the slack. “Murphy?” I ventured after a few moments.

“Sorry, I must have water in my ear or something, because it _sounded_ like you just said that Marcone—and we are talking about the same Marcone, right? Gentleman John, resident criminal mastermind Marcone?—asked _you_ out on a date.”

Her surprise would have been more gratifying if her tone hadn’t implied that Marcone was way out of my league.

“The same Marcone,” I confirmed grudgingly.

“Well, what’d you say?”

“I said no, of course!” Seriously, Bob and Murphy both, why did they even need to ask? “He’s scum and I don’t trust him as far as I could throw him. Every minute spent in his presence is a minute too long. I don’t want to be a civil acquaintance of the man, much less his…”—I groped for a word that didn’t start with _boy_ and end with _friend_ —“…date.”

“Harry, are you telling me you thought he was _serious?_ ” Murphy demanded in disbelief. “Don’t get me wrong and all, you’re a great guy and I love you like a particularly stupid brother, but Marcone could do better than you in his sleep. Assuming he even bats for the home team, and there hasn’t been even the suggestion of a rumor that he does.”

Well, when she put it that way, I did feel a little silly. “He _sounded_ serious,” I muttered, somewhat abashed.

I could practically hear her eyes rolling. “Of course he did, because he just loves to screw with your head. And then in a fit of homophobic pique you shot him down and flounced off before you could find out what was really going on.”

“I… no…” I managed. Homophobic pique wasn’t the problem here— _stay tuned, full story at 11!_ —but this wasn’t the opportune time to share that with Murphy. And anyway, she wasn’t done talking yet.

“I suppose it could be coincidence that a supernatural attack hits at the same time that you get propositioned by Marcone, but my instincts say it’s not—so swallow your offended heterosexuality and go find out what he wants.”

 _He wants to_ _ **do**_ _you!_ a voice in my head suggested brightly, sounding remarkably like Bob. I ignored it, same as I do the real Bob.

Murphy was the detective; she had good instincts, and they agreed with my first instinct—that something fishy was going on here. Surely that was it. He probably had something he wanted to discuss off-the-record, as I’d done with many a questionable associate over beers at Mac’s.

It was harder to ignore the other voice, the one that sounded an awful lot like Bob and was challenging me to remember the last time he’d been wrong.

 

I got off the phone with Murphy, then spent the next couple hours shuffling unpaid bills and tinkering with the unsteady leg on my desk. I was dragging my feet on calling Marcone back, on the off-chance that the apocalypse would intervene and spare me the indignity. When the end of the world failed to oblige, however, I finally caved and called him at half past six.

I didn’t have caller ID, since it never would have stayed working in my office anyway, but he’d managed to slip me his card a while back and I knew his number. Numbers, plural, actually—which, to a wizard who was lucky to keep one phone in working order, much less half a dozen, seemed excessive.

“This is John,” he answered after a couple rings, his voice as crisp and businesslike as a newly minted $100 bill.

“Uh… hi. This is Harry Dresden.” Like he was going to forget my name, or confuse me with one of the numerous other Dresdens running around town.

“Mr. Dresden, an unexpected pleasure.” His voice had slid seamlessly into something smooth and perhaps a touch acquisitive. “I hadn’t thought I’d be hearing from you again so soon.”

“Yeah, well…” And so much for making that segue sound casual and spontaneous. “I changed my mind about your earlier offer.”

The silence that followed was long enough to have been a tell in poker, if only I could have seen the facial expression that accompanied it.

“Have you now,” he said at last, and his tone made it clear that he hadn’t been expecting that, and was powerfully curious. “May I ask what brought about this change of heart?”

“Magic,” I said flippantly.

“I sincerely hope not,” he replied, and a wary, guarded note dipped briefly into his voice, there for a moment then gone just as fast. “So, Friday evening—would you rather I picked you up from your apartment or your office?”

“Hey whoa, who said we were taking your car?” I protested, rapidly backpedaling. As stated above, I didn’t trust Marcone as far as I could throw him, and the last thing I wanted was to be stuck relying on him for transportation when he brought trouble down on my head.

“Considering that I’m the one initiating and assuming financial responsibility for this excursion, I believe it’s traditional that I also provide the vehicle.”

“To hell with tradition—” I began, but Marcone smoothly cut me off.

“I do realize, however, that our somewhat... _eventful_ history sets us apart from the usual standards of courtship. Which is why I’m willing to declare a truce—I, John Marcone, Freeholding Lord of the Unseelie Accords, do hereby swear that no harm will come to you, by my hand or by my negligence, for the duration of the date.”

He didn’t have to, really. I knew he wasn’t going to do anything to me, first because that would be gauche and unsubtle, and second because—despite my own grave reluctance to admit any association between us—I’d been his ally more often than I’d been his enemy and he knew it. Still, it was a polite offer, and a pointed reminder that he was a major player on ‘my side of the fence’ now, with the authority to make pacts using the Accords and the power to back them up.

“Alright,” I allowed. “Then I swear the same. I won’t gank you and I won’t let anyone else do it either. For the duration of the date.”

And yeah, it kinda sorta made me wince to say ‘date’ out loud.

“Settled, then. Dress casual, I’ll pick you up from your house at seven.”

Oh, the things I do for great justice.

 

Now it may seem like I was taking this whole business of being asked out by another man with remarkable aplomb—but the truth was, I was far more troubled by the part where he was a crime lord and, by common consensus, one of the _bad_ guys rather than because he was _a_ guy.

See, I’d always liked to think of myself as theoretically bisexual; I’d just never had the chance to put theory into practice. Because while everyone else was in college, smoking pot and exploring their sexuality, I was on a farm in Kansas with a five-hundred-year-old wizard learning how to control my powers so I didn’t accidentally blow up the world. So while I obviously wasn’t gay—I liked women far too much for that—I also knew that I enjoyed checking out the occasional guy.

Like Thomas, for example, before I knew we were related, because _hot_ _damn_ , he is good-looking, which is more a statement of fact than a statement of intent. I thought I’d caught him eyeing me a couple times too, White Court vampire and all that; I figured that he’d probably make a move eventually, and I hadn’t quite decided whether I would go along with it when he did, but I was leaning toward yes. I’m a wizard, after all—I have a lot of years to spare, and by all accounts, the White Court can make it worth your while.

It was a little freaky when I found out he was my brother, partially because sexual interest isn’t a switch you can just flip to “off” after suddenly discovering an uncomfortable degree of consanguinity, and partially because sometimes I _still_ got the vibe from Thomas that he’d be willing to go for it anyway. (White Court vampires, Christ almighty.)

The only person I’d admitted it to was Bob, who had proceeded to load me down with information about genetic sexual attraction and his favorite twin porn. I’d told him he was forbidden to bring up the subject ever again.

In the long run though, once I got over the sexual tension, I preferred to have Thomas as a brother. I’d never had family before, and I would take that over a gay fling any day of the week.

Marcone, on the other hand, was a slightly different story.

I’d known _of_ him long before I ever met the man, knew that he’d been the one responsible for a slew of gangland murders during his rise to power, and that since settling into the job he’d taken control of a narcotics industry (among other things) that generated countless millions of dollars. In the dog-eat-dog world of organized crime, I’d given him long odds on lasting out a year before someone bigger and meaner came along to unseat him, and good riddance.

But then… it didn’t happen. Not only was Marcone here to stay, but the man had Ideas about how Chicago ought to be run and damned if he didn’t make good on them. Petty crime plummeted, with offenders either discreetly removed or taken into the fold where their talents could be put to more productive use. Police corruption was at an all-time high, but I seemed to be the only one in the city who cared, everyone else too busy fêting Marcone for doing what three generations of police chiefs couldn’t.

Fine, so he was a _megalomaniac_ mobster. Five years tops, I thought, before he overreaches himself and digs his own grave, Capone-style. Power corrupts—and Marcone had enough of that to corrupt a saint, which he sure as hell wasn’t.

But then I met the man, got tricked into a soulgaze, and discovered that what I didn’t know about Marcone could have filled a book. That _he_ didn’t think he was a bad guy came as no surprise, because they never do—it’s not like anyone wakes up and says, _Hey, you know what would be fun? Being_ _ **evil!!**_ _—but_ the lack of brutality did. And while nobody was about to accuse him of being a bleeding heart, he was staunchly, one might say _ethically_ , opposed to collateral damage and to letting uninvolved bystanders get hurt. “Bad for business,” he was fond of saying, since in his line of work it was safer to be seen as business-savvy than as hampered by conventional morality, but I had seen the man’s soul and I knew it was just a line. He was relentless in his pursuit of power, but he wasn’t selling his soul to do it—literally, since Nicodemus had put that exact offer to him, quite persuasively, and Marcone hadn’t given in. He wanted power, but only on his own terms.

I didn’t _want_ to like him, damn it, because everything he had made was built on human misery, but with the relentless patience of the predators he so reminded me of, he had spent the intervening years wearing down my resistance. He was charming, deceptively affable, and _unfairly_ good-looking, making it hard to remember why I wasn’t allowed to respond in kind. He also seemed to genuinely like me, despite my own best efforts. He indulged the lip I gave him and met my constant needling with amused equanimity—as steadfast an ally as I’d never wanted. He helped me whether I asked for it or not, far beyond the call of duty, and carried out his particular brand of gangland justice on the bad guys who were even badder than him.

And meanwhile he continued to engage in drug trafficking, prostitution, extortion, smuggling, gun-running, and any number of other rackets. Needless to say, I was somewhat conflicted when it came to John Marcone—and here I’d agreed to dinner and a movie with him.

As my apprentice would say in the idiom of youth: fuck me _sideways._

 

Friday was, by turns, stretching out forever and going by too damned fast. I ended up starting work early, since I’d woken up at five and been unable to get back to sleep, for reasons _totally_ unrelated to date anxiety. To keep my mind off it I went ahead and got busy, starting with a quick jaunt down to North Avenue Beach to see if I could pick up any trace of what had caused the incident yesterday. The police had cordoned off a large section of the beach, with a vague but ominous warning about dangerous wildlife, but nobody was around to enforce it when I slipped down for a look.

I lingered out there for nearly half an hour, going so far as to strip a sock off and poke my foot in the water to tempt whatever might be lurking down there, but there was no sign of anything even remotely amiss. Even daring to flick on my Sight didn’t help because the people who died had done so offshore, and moving water is to magical remains as an eraser is to a chalkboard. Discouraged, and with absolutely nothing to show for my time, I got back in my car and drove off.

I felt a little better after wrapping up two easy retrieval cases I’d had on my plate, tracking down an heirloom locket to the lost and found in Grand Central Station, and a stolen music box to the briefcase of a south side thug. The briefcase happened to still be connected to the thug in question, which might have posed difficulties for some people since he looked like a pit bull in flannel and acted about like one too, but being a wizard up against a plain vanilla human tips the scales a bit. I left him napping in a warehouse, briefcase chained to his wrist, and phoned in an anonymous tip to the police. I’d briefly entertained the idea of calling Marcone instead and letting him handle it, but he tended to be even tougher on petty crime than the police and I didn’t necessarily want to get the guy killed.

Feeling more benevolent toward the world at large, I even tossed in free home delivery to my two satisfied customers, getting coy and innuendo-laden thanks from the elderly widow who’d lost her locket, and more subdued gratitude from the sour-faced antiques dealer who’d been robbed. Four-hundred and fifty dollars in the green, I treated myself to lunch at Subway and was back in my office enjoying a ham on wheat before I remembered that I’d agreed to a date with John Marcone.

With nothing else to occupy me for the afternoon, time ground to a halt, until at last I resigned myself to the fact that everyone else had taken an early weekend and I might as well do the same. I was outside in the hallway locking up when I heard the trudging, exhausted gait of someone unused to climbing six flights of stairs, which is most everyone except me. A moment later a pretty, slightly plump young woman appeared on the landing, glancing once at the floor number, and then her eyes slid unerringly down the hallway to land on me.

“Ah—Are you Mr. Dresden?” she stammered out, obviously not having expected to find me standing in the hallway. I immediately pegged her as the type who might well have chickened out before working up the nerve to knock, but here I’d gone and taken the choice away from her.

“That’s me,” I confirmed, giving her what I hoped was a reassuring, professional smile. Just when I’d started looking forward to going home early…

I flicked the key again, turning the lock as if I’d been on my way in instead of on my way out, and then held the door open for her. She flashed me a skittish smile and dipped her head in a polite nod as she ducked into my office. I followed a step behind, flicking on the lights as I went.

I could see her looking around the office with a mixture of apprehension and curiosity, clearly uneasy here but looking more embarrassed than afraid—which was unfortunately par for the course for a lot of my clients. They came to me when they had problems that no one else could fix, but on the list of things that people don’t like to acknowledge in public, I tended to rank down there with embarrassing rashes.

“Uhm… so you’re supposed to be a real wizard, right? Not one of those guys who do magic shows for birthday parties?” she asked, sounding a little distracted as she scanned the room as if expecting to see proof in the form of a framed diploma. Certified Wizard, from Accredited University, etc.

“Yeah, I don’t mix well with birthday parties,” I agreed. “Why don’t you have a seat, tell me your name, and then we can get started.”

“Oh, right,” she said, startled out of her fascination with my office and turning to offer me a hand. “Sorry, I’m Tabetha Williams. You can call me Tabby though, most people do.”

I was only a shade wary at taking her hand, but her face was candid and open, without the slightest hint that she might know what it meant to touch a wizard’s hand, or to offer up her real name so carelessly. Because I could tell that it had been her real name, the easy cadence with which it rolled off her tongue and on a deeper level, a sub-audible rumble as the magic associated with names recognized that as hers.

I took her hand. There was no telltale flicker of magic to identify her as another practitioner. She had a firm handshake and would have readily met my eyes if I hadn’t been avoiding it. Innocent as a babe in the woods.

“Call me Harry,” I offered, letting go of her hand and moving to settle behind my desk. “So what seems to be the problem?”

“Ah, right, yes,” she stammered, taking the chair opposite me, her hands squeezing the purse in her lap. “I—I’m very sorry, I’m just not used to this. I’ve never met anyone who claimed to be a wizard before, and I’m not sure if this is your sort of thing or not, but…”

“Ms. Williams,” I interrupted gently. “Why don’t you just explain the situation, starting from the beginning, and I’ll see what I can do to help.”

She took a deep breath, fixed her eyes on the corner of my desk, and blurted out, “My husband’s been acting strange recently.”

I mentally upgraded her to Mrs. Williams and wondered if this was going to be one of those divorce cases that real PIs always bitched about.

“In what way?” I asked encouragingly.

“He’s been away from home a lot,” she answered, slowly gaining momentum now that the ice had been broken. “He won’t tell me where he’s going. He hasn’t been sleeping well lately and he’s become a lot more distant.”

Which was practically taken from the handbook of extramarital affairs.

I sighed. “Mrs. Williams, this doesn’t sound like the type of case I deal with. If you’re looking for a detective to investigate your husband I can give you some recommendations, but that’s not my specialty.”

She glanced up at me, a spark of annoyance flaring in her eyes, and I saw a little more of her hesitation fall away. “Mr. Dresden, are you implying that my husband is cheating on me? First of all, when he does come home late, he comes in smelling like rotten eggs, not perfume. Second, when I say ‘acting strange,’ I mean that he’s been hammering the silverware into bizarre shapes and hiding them under the couch cushions. And third, I only came to you because he’s been leaving the phone book open on the kitchen table for the past two weeks straight, with your listing circled. Let me assure you, an affair is the least of my worries.”

Okay, she won. That sounded like my kind of weird.

“Your silverware wouldn’t happen to be real silver, would it?” I asked.

She looked startled, as if she’d been expecting more skepticism, or at least a question that bore some superficial relevance to the topic at hand. “Ah—yes, actually. It was a wedding present from my mother, which is why I was so angry when he started tearing it up. Why, what difference does that make?”

I didn’t want to tell her that I thought her husband was making wards against face-eating supernatural beasties, not yet anyway. It would have been helpful if I could have examined one of them in person, but I could tell from the non-reaction of my wards that she wasn’t carrying any such device with her.

“Does he tend to use more spoons or knives?”

“Ah—I don’t know. Spoons, I think,” she answered warily, as though she thought I might be making fun of her.

So it was reflective, defensive magic then. Probably a good idea if he was going to be leaving them around where his wife could stumble across them. As for going out at night and coming back smelling like rotten eggs (aka _sulfur_ ) in my world that tended to mean only one thing—hellfire. Which was just what I needed to make my weekend complete.

“Mr. Dresden?” Tabby prompted cautiously. “Do you know what’s going on?”

“I have some ideas,” I said, not willing to commit to a theory yet. “Have you ever known him to do anything quirky like this in the past? Odd, ritualized behavior?”

She shook her head immediately. “No, nothi—” Then promptly cut herself off as something occurred to her. “Well, he has this thing where he puts salt in the corners of the room, but his mother was Irish and it’s just an old superstition he picked up from her.”

Just a superstition, right, that an independent, 20th century son married to an educated American woman would probably have been all-too-willing to let lapse—unless he knew what it was for. I also took note of the past tense when she spoke of his mother.

So far the evidence pointed to her husband being a magic practitioner, probably a hereditary one if he’d picked up cleansing rituals from his mother. The only questions left were how powerful he was, and why he wanted me involved in his business when it didn’t sound like it could possibly be anything legit.

“Does your husband have a cellphone? Or a computer?”

She nodded readily. “Of course. He’s a paralegal.”

“Have they broken down recently?”

That earned me a stunned silence, and for the first time she really _looked_ at me, her intelligent brown eyes sharpening with suspicion or maybe the first hint of belief. “How did you know that?”

I motioned around the office with one hand. “Notice my lack of delicate electronic equipment? I don’t know what the physics behind it are, but wizards have a sort of anti-technology field that makes machines go haywire. Really high tech things like laptops and cellphones are the first to go.”

She breathed out a short, disbelieving laugh. “Mr. Dresden, are you telling me that you think my husband is a _wizard?_ ”

“Mrs. Williams, this goes beyond ‘think’—judging from what you’ve said, I’m almost certain of it.”

“That’s ridiculous,” she declared flatly, and I could see her reeling back in whatever faith I had started to garner. “I’ve known him for six years. My husband is _not_ a wizard.”

I thought about Charity and Michael, married for more than twenty, and the dirty little secret that she still hadn’t told him.

“It sounds like he’s been non-practicing for most of your marriage,” I acknowledged. “He never used his power until now, so it was dormant, which is why there was never anything strange for you to notice before. Except now for some reason he’s started again, and I’ll be honest with you, what he’s doing sounds really shady.”

Tabby huffed out a sigh and slumped in her chair a little. “Unbelievable,” she said without conviction.

“Well if it’ll make you any happier, you don’t have to believe me,” I offered. I suspected that a lot of my clients didn’t, or didn’t want to, anyway. “As long as you follow my instructions, we can still get the job done.”

She forced a brave face. “If you can help, then it doesn’t matter whether I want to believe it or not, because I don’t know who else to turn to. If he’s been dragged into something dangerous then I want to help him, but if it’s illegal I don’t want to get him in trouble by involving the police. I don’t know who else to ask—I tried telling a friend that I was worried about how he’d been acting, but she just freaked out and thought he’d gone crazy. She wanted me to leave him before he did something to hurt me.”

“Well, if it is illegal, the police aren’t the ones he should be worried about,” I told her honestly.

The people to watch out for were the trigger-happy White Council, whom I was in no hurry to call even though rogue wizards were technically their jurisdiction. In their eyes though, ignorance of the law is no excuse and standard operating procedure is to shoot first and ask questions later, if at all. If Jonathan didn’t know that what he was doing was a crime—as Molly hadn’t, as _I_ hadn’t, once upon a time—then I wanted to give him a heads up before siccing the wardens on him. (Technically I was a warden myself, but that didn’t mean I had to be a _dick_ about it.)

“Anyway,” I pushed on, “erratic as his behavior may seem, it’s not because he’s crazy. Or at least there’s a method to the madness, as the bard would say.”

Tabby cracked her first real smile in our acquaintance, wry but genuine. “Actually he said, ‘Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t.’ I teach Brit lit at Loyola,” she added by way of explanation.

I upgraded her again to Dr. Mrs. Williams.

She seemed to find her equanimity in that, because she drew in a breath and then said, “Okay, so what we do?”

I was touched that she considered this a joint endeavor—how were _we_ going to fix this, rather than flailing in distress and dumping the mess at my feet. I was also a little worried, because getting her more involved would invariably put her at higher risk of getting hurt or killed. Possibly even by him, if he took exception to her snooping in his affairs.

“Well, first I’m going to need to know everything you can tell me about your husband, starting with his full name.”

Tabby had plenty to tell me about her husband, her affection for him evident in every word—she just didn’t have much that was useful. His name was Jonathan Ailill Williams (I had to get her to spell that middle name for me). She’d met him while she was on vacation in LA as an undergrad, they’d hit it off immediately and proceeded to maintain a long distance relationship for six months until he moved to Chicago to be closer to her. He’d been estranged from both his parents since before she came into his life—which, I noted silently, was unfortunately rather common for families with magic—and the only relative of his she’d ever met was his uncle, a handsome and affable (if slightly eccentric) man named Cary. The name didn’t ring any bells, but that didn’t necessarily mean anything.

“Has he asked you to do anything... strange since this started?” I asked carefully, my gut tightening as I remembered the last woman who’d gotten dragged into her husband’s necromancy.

But Tabby’s face showed no flicker of comprehension and she just shook her head blankly. “Nothing that I can think of. Like what?”

“You’d know if he had,” I said grimly. “In any case, I’m not sure how much I can tell you without seeing them in person, but if you can remember what his silverware creations looked like, then I might be able to get some idea of what they’re for.”

It turned out she could do one better than that, and given a pencil and blank sheet of paper, she set to sketching a shaky but detailed diagram of the device.

“They’d been twisted around into a sort of spiky ring,” Tabby explained as she drew, brow furrowed with concentration. “Tied together with copper wire, and there was some stuff wrapped around it that looked like hair. Wrapped around on purpose, I mean, not just hair that got caught on it.”

That made sense because it could give the ward a specific target to guard, or to be on guard against. “What color hair?”

“Dark brown. Maybe black.” Which narrowed it down not at all.

She added a few finishing details to the drawing, glanced over it critically, then slid it across the desk to me. “I hope that’s helpful,” she said apologetically. “Sorry I don’t remember it better.”

My mouth had gone dry and for a moment I just stared at the innocuous-looking pencil sketch. “Are you sure this is it?” I asked, voice oddly muted.

“Pretty sure, yeah. Why?”

I said nothing, because the deceptively benign wreath on the paper before me was the most aggressively deadly defensive spell that I had ever seen. This wasn’t a ward—it was a _landmine_.

 

Much as my first instinct was to go tearing hell-for-leather after this wizard who was making bombs capable of blowing greater Chicago into a doughnut, I had to check it with the knowledge that, oh yeah, _I_ had dark-brown-maybe-black hair—which meant dangerously high odds that the target was me. Call me cynical and paranoid, but this whole thing sounded like exactly the sort of con that could be expected to work on me: the wife gets primed, all-unknowing, to take this problem to the only man in town who can help: Harry Dresden, world’s biggest sucker for women in distress, who gallantly rides to the rescue and proceeds to blow himself to smithereens when he triggers what he thought was a simple defensive ward.

Hoo. I wasn’t sure I liked Jonathan Williams anymore.

The only consolation was that this particular spell was a last resort, panic-button sort of self-destruct, the kind of spell that doesn’t transport well; it uses the energy from the threshold to fuel the blast and thus can only be employed on the wizard’s home turf. In other words, as long as I didn’t go into his house I was safe—there was no danger of finding this particular prize shoved up the Beetle’s tailpipe.

I was reluctant to send Tabby home after that, not to a booby-trapped house and a husband like that, but she wouldn’t hear of it when I tried to suggest that she stay at a hotel for a while. The best I could do was give her a short lecture on Supernatural Defense 101, with a brief explanation of the power of thresholds and why she shouldn’t invite anyone, _anyone_ into the house, not even people she thought she knew, until this mess was resolved. Interestingly, she told me that her husband had recently given her the same order, though he had declined to explain why.

Then, with nothing else to be done for the moment, I sent her off with instructions to find and dismantle as many of the damned things as she could. They were no danger to her, seeing as she’d already picked them up and moved them around to no effect, but the same couldn’t be said for me or anyone else.

Then I tried to call Murphy, but she wasn’t answering her cellphone. I left a message on her voicemail asking if she could run a background check on Jonathan Ailill Williams for me, paying close attention to his family and being on the lookout for an uncle Cary in particular.

Then I glanced at the clock and realized that Marcone was expecting to pick me up in half an hour.

 _Shit._

 


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Cue the shenanigans.

I managed to beat Marcone to my apartment, but only barely, and I certainly hadn’t found the time to change. The moment I stepped through the door I was shanghaied into the kitchen by two hungry animals, and when a thirty-pound cat and a two-ton dog get it in their mind to herd you somewhere, by god you go. When they were safely distracted with their kibbles and bits I fled to my bedroom, but I hadn’t even managed to undo half the buttons on my shirt when the doorbell rang. Here I’d been hoping Marcone would run a little late, so of course it figured that he would arrive a punctual five minutes early. I swear, he did these things just to spite me.

“I know I said casual,” Marcone remarked delicately when I answered the door, taking in my state of _dishabille_ with a raised eyebrow. “But I wasn’t thinking quite _that_ casual.”

“You caught me changing—work ran late and I just got home.” Because that sounded better than “I forgot.”

Marcone, of course, looked great, the bastard, wearing jeans and a forest green sweater that still managed to look every inch as tailored as his suits. He carried a bouquet that he extended to me almost diffidently. “Roses are overdone.”

I’d taken the bouquet without thinking, because that’s what people tend to do when handed things, but that meant I was now stuck holding a bouquet that _John Marcone_ had given me in advance of _our date._

I looked at the flowers in my hands, fragrant and lovely and totally not what I wanted to be carrying. “Aren’t lilies for funerals?” I asked instead, at a loss for anything else.

Marcone shrugged. “You said it, Mr. Dresden, not I. May I come in?”

“I’m not going to invite you,” I replied, but I left the door open behind me as I turned away and he understood that as the unspoken permission that it was.

My living room suddenly seemed a lot smaller with Marcone in it, hands in his pockets as he surveyed the place. It made me keenly aware of how much of _me_ was in this room, how much my home said about my personality, and how a lot of that was kind of embarrassing. He’d drifted to the bookshelf and picked up one of my Snoopy bookends to examine, but was at least polite enough not to remark on it. Telling myself that he wasn’t going to break or steal anything, I left him to it and slipped back into the bedroom, dumping the lilies in the bathroom sink as I went.

Which was when I was reminded of Bob’s damnable tendency to be _always right_ , because it suddenly occurred to me that I really didn’t have anything that would pass muster on a date with Marcone, even one that he called casual. I spent approximately three seconds worrying about it, then figured, what the hell—Marcone knew full well what I was like and what he was in for, and if I managed to embarrass him in public then kudos to me.

Or that was the theory, anyway, but I still ended up eyeing myself in front of the mirror, dubious and more than a little self-conscious about the best that I’d managed to rustle up. The sports jacket I had last worn when Murphy and I had gone undercover to some pseudo-formal event, where I’d ended up duking it out with a vengeful spirit and getting drenched in ectoplasm and then stripping in the backseat of her car while she stood sentry outside to make sure that no one accidentally caught an eyeful of mostly-naked wizard while I changed into a set of spare clothes thoughtfully lent to us by the gallery’s night security guard. Even though I’d been a bad friend and left it in an ectoplasm-laden wad of laundry on her backseat, she’d been a good friend and returned it to me dry-cleaned; it was a testament to how the jacket had sat untouched on its hanger for the better part of two years that it was still pressed.

I found Marcone in the living room right where I had left him, standing in front of my bookcase and leafing through a book that I didn’t immediately recognize. Mister had somehow thumbed his nose at the laws of gravity long enough to maneuver his bulk onto one of the lower shelves so that he was within arm’s reach of Marcone, and was now looking rapturous as Marcone absently stroked his chin. Mouse was sitting in the corner, and far from sounding his usual warning growl against bad guys, was looking unaccountably bereft at the lack of mobster attention.

“So much for man’s best friend,” I muttered, sweeping my keys and my blasting rod off the hearth and shoving both into a deep pants pocket. Just because Marcone had promised not to attack me this evening didn’t mean the rest of the world had to follow suit.

Marcone looked up when I entered, a smile for the book carrying over to me as he replaced it on the shelf. He took in my outfit, eyes doing a quick rake up and down, and I felt absurdly buoyed by the way his smile didn’t dim.

“You realize you’ve set yourself up for the oldest joke in the book, right?” he asked with a nod at my pants.

I rolled my eyes. “Yes, it’s a blasting rod in my pocket, and no, I’m not happy to see you. Can we go now? The sooner we leave, the sooner we get this over with.”

“Why Harry, if I’d known you would be this profusely appreciative I would have made the invitation years ago.” He turned toward the door, extending his arm to me.

I stared at the proffered elbow. “Not a chance,” I said flatly.

I have no idea what the expression looked like, but it must have been a good one because even Marcone couldn’t keep a straight face. He gave a wicked chuckle, but mercifully let the issue drop.

“Tell me, are you familiar with the maxim of choosing your battles wisely?” he inquired as he opened the front door and gallantly motioned that I should go first.

I looked at him suspiciously as we went up the stairs. “Yes. But how many battles do you plan on putting me through this evening?”

“That, Mr. Dresden, is entirely up to you.”

Which was when I emerged at street level and discovered the _horse-drawn carriage_ he had waiting for us at the curb.

 

“This is completely and utterly ludicrous and ridiculous,” I informed him with righteous indignation. Probably would have sounded even more righteous if I hadn’t been trying to sink through the seats and disappear. “And I can’t believe you managed to talk me into it.”

Actually there hadn’t been much talking involved. At the sight of the damned thing— _a horse-drawn carriage, complete with a nervous footman and a long-suffering Hendricks standing by_ —I’d gone into a stunned sort of apoplexy. Marcone had smoothly hustled me into the carriage and started it rolling before I’d recovered. It was a gorgeous evening, crisp and just a little breezy, with the open-air carriage to let it all in, but I was in no state to enjoy it.

“What happened to good taste?” I demanded.

I knew, intellectually, that Marcone had worked his way up from humble origins, but unlike most nouveau riche who suddenly find themselves with more money than sense, he’d always been remarkably classy. Until now.

“Sacrificed in favor of practicality, I’m afraid,” Marcone replied, though he failed to sound very regretful. More like he was having a private belly laugh at my expense. “Reliable sources tell me that not even you can manage to make horses malfunction, and nothing ruins the mood quite like being forced to wait on the roadside for a tow truck.”

“Right, and any amusement value is entirely incidental,” I grumbled.

Yet even as embarrassing and extravagant as this was, some part of me (a deep part, one that I wasn’t _ever_ going to acknowledge aloud) was obscurely touched by the gesture. People always gripe about how inconvenient it is to have me around, blowing up their delicate and expensive machinery—as if I could help it. And even though anyone who spends enough time around me eventually learns to accommodate it, no one had ever gone whole-hog and rented a freaking carriage for me.

Granted, the larger part of me was absolutely mortified at the idea of being seen riding around in a carriage with John Marcone. What Murphy would say if she heard—oh, who was I kidding, _when_ she heard—didn’t even bear thinking about.

“Surely there has to be a cover you can put up,” I said desperately, twisting around in my seat to look for one. “I mean, what do the tourists do if it starts raining?”

“But it’s such a lovely evening,” Marcone protested mildly, voice rippling slightly from the effort not to laugh. “I’d like to enjoy it, wouldn’t you?”

I harrumphed back into my seat. “Fine, but I’m dropping a veil on us.”

Hendricks, riding (har) shotgun, gave me a doleful look to suggest that he too would have liked to be spared this indignity. Meanwhile, Marcone couldn’t have been sunnier if we’d been going on a picnic. A picnic where the main course was the severed heads of his enemies.

“Indeed, I was hoping you might,” he said agreeably, his hand sliding up to rest on my knee.

Ah yes, the other drawback of this vehicle. The nice thing about limos is that there’s practically a no man’s land between the seats. Horse-drawn carriages, on the other hand, aren’t designed for people trying to avoid intimate contact with their fellow passenger. Also, I could swear the backseat was tilted inward, because I _had_ put more than six inches of space between me and Marcone when we first got in.

I looked at the hand on my knee, then at Marcone’s blood-in-the-water smile. I supposed I could throw myself bodily out of the carriage if I had to. I’d survived worse.

“I don’t put out on the first date,” I informed him, lifting up his hand like a dead rat and depositing it in his own lap.

He took my rejection with slightly unnerving equanimity. “I do,” he replied cheerily. “But that’s neither here nor there.”

“Look, enough with the innuendo and grabby hands,” I said brusquely. I was trying to sound gruff and no-bullshit, but probably failing. “Let’s make a few things clear—just because I agreed to this little charade doesn’t mean I like you or that I trust you. I’m here because I know you’ve got something up your sleeve and I intend to find out what.”

Marcone blinked. “You know, Mr. Dresden, I’ve never known anyone else who takes a sledgehammer to the art of polite conversation with quite the élan that you do.”

“You dragged me out here because you wanted to talk, right? So start talking.”

“If you insist,” Marcone said. “How was your day?”

Blink. “What?”

He was looking at me expectantly. “That’s usually an acceptable opening volley.”

I was about to reply, with a measure of disbelief, that everything was same old, same old—but then I remembered Tabby Williams and her husband and his magical landmines, Murphy’s kelpie (or whatever) that was drowning swimmers in Lake Michigan, all of which had managed to take backseat to this date-with-Marcone nonsense. And how ‘coincidence’ was nearly a four-letter word for me these days.

Still, there was no telling where his interests lay and I didn’t want to tip my hand if I could avoid it. I shrugged, leaning back into the seats and folding my arms over my head. “Business as usual. A bit of search-and-retrieve. Might have a bit of police work coming my way.”

“Oh?” he prompted in the pause, his poker face impeccable. Impossible to tell whether he was bored and being polite, or mildly intrigued the way he was about most things I did, or burning with curiosity about a matter deeply relevant to his interests. He absently scratched his knee, which meant his knuckles also happened to rub against my thigh. Damn the man.

I shrugged again, in the process disrupting the tenuous connection my jeans were forming with the vinyl seat, and sliding another few inches closer toward Marcone. “It might’ve been in the paper today. A bunch of people drowned on North Avenue Beach.”

His eyes narrowed slightly as that apparently rang a bell. “It did make the papers. Though they attributed it to an alligator, and reminded people never to dispose of unwanted such pets into the public water supply.”

“Yeah, well, I’m glad they could make a teachable moment out of it, but it wasn’t an alligator,” I muttered with about 99% certainty. Though who knows, alligators with hypnosis and memory-meddling—I had seen stranger things, right?

“Do you know what it was?” Marcone asked, again politely inscrutable.

“Not yet. Do you?” I asked bluntly.

He shook his head, with either perfect ignorance or a damned good imitation of it. “No. I didn’t even know it was… outside the normal realm of things, until you told me so.”

Alright, so I’d gone fishing with Murphy’s story and turned up nothing. I still didn’t _trust_ Marcone, but what I’d neglected to mention was that I usually felt like I _understood_ him well enough to make up the difference. If he’d been involved with the not-a-kelpie and wanted to keep me from finding out about it, there were better ways than dragging my ass out to town in a horse-drawn carriage. So I believed him.

Leaving Tabby and her problem, which was slightly more difficult to drop into casual conversation. Absentee husbands. Sulfur. Landmines that could blow an atomic hole in the city that Marcone and I both got really protective of. I’m talking _really_ protective, like a dad watching his thirteen-year-old daughter go off on her first date.

“Well what about you?” I asked, turning it around. “Run into any bad guys lately?”

Someone wielding hellfire, perhaps?

Marcone observed me in shrewd silence for a moment, and from the canny expression on his face I could tell even before he spoke that he wasn’t going to give me a direct answer. “I believe by your definition of the word, Mr. Dresden, I associate with ‘bad guys’ on a daily basis. In fact, I believe you’ve been known on occasion to insinuate that _I_ fall into that category.”

“It’s hardly _insinuating_ when I tell that to everyone who will listen every chance I get.”

It just never seemed to do much good.

Marcone smiled tolerantly. “A quote comes to mind, about ladies who protest too much. But I desist.”

I had my mouth open, ready to crossly complain about people who thought that protesting _at all_ was protesting too much, when I realized how neatly I’d been sidetracked. As long as I kept being evasive, asking vague questions, he was going to be able to get away with equally vague answers. I might be able to get more if I asked him directly, but I didn’t want to tell him about Tabby. And though I got the feeling that _he_ was after something too, he didn’t seem in a hurry to get to the point either.

Then I realized that we’d reached this stalemate precisely because neither of us were willing to give an inch of ground, and I chuckled a little.

Marcone quirked an eyebrow, inviting me to share the joke.

“Seems like this conversation would go a lot more smoothly if we trusted each other,” I observed ruefully.

“No, actually it wouldn’t,” he said with perfect certainty. His tone sounded like he would continue but then he brought himself up short, looking briefly annoyed, as if he’d given away more than he intended to. Changing the subject, he asked, “So how about you? Is there anyone in town that I should know about?”

I thought about it, shaking my head slowly. “Only the usual suspects.”

He looked dissatisfied with that answer and I could see the gears in his head turning, but then he let it go, changing the subject to Paranet, a support network for mid- and low-level practitioners that I’d been helping organize. Since the White Council tended to ignore all wizards below a certain threshold of power, that meant that no one was around to protect them if the bad guys came a-calling. I was hoping that getting them networked would provide at least some safety in numbers, though it hadn’t been put to the test yet.

Marcone, perhaps unsurprisingly, fully endorsed anything that helped empower the underdog. He had a number of astute observations and suggestions on the logistical side, though I drew the line at accepting his offer to help fund it. I didn’t need him buying the loyalty of every practitioner in the state.

That topic took us all the way to Morton’s, where the mouth-watering aroma of steak, prime-cut and cooked to savory perfection, found us when we were still a block away. I’d started salivating as soon as the smell hit my nostrils and my stomach was already rumbling in anticipation. I only barely managed to stop myself from declaring to Marcone that I _loved_ him, because I seriously couldn’t even remember the last time I’d smelled anything so delicious.

“That smells delicious,” I told Marcone fervently. “If your driver doesn’t stop soon I might try to jump out.”

“Glad you approve,” he said graciously as the carriage rolled to a bumpy halt. Usually when a car makes a stop like that it doesn’t bode well for the engine, and I had the brief, automatic panic that I’d made something explode, until I remembered that this was one vehicle I couldn’t break even if I wanted to.

“We’re here,” Marcone announced, unlatching the door and climbing out.

Oh right, but the drawback to said vehicle was the attention it was now attracting. Around us I could see some curious, amused pedestrians slowing to watch the spectacle, just in time to witness my grand entry. Damn it.

Marcone, as though he’d guessed what I was thinking, smirked. “Coming?”

“I hate you,” I grumbled as I climbed across the seats.

“You can wait in the carriage if you like,” Marcone offered. “I’m sure they’ll let me box up something for you when I’m done eating.”

“Hate you _so much_.”

He chuckled and helped me down from the cab, resting an _entirely unnecessary_ hand on my elbow to do so and then letting it linger. By now, as I’d feared, there were a dozen or so witnesses to the act and a buzz of amused murmurs.

“I should have stayed in the carriage,” I muttered as we went up the walk to the restaurant, scrupulously avoiding eye contact with anyone.

“Relax, Harry,” he said soothingly, a cool murmur in my ear that made me shiver, in the good way. “Nobody knows who you are. They’re far more interested in gossiping about me.”

“Don’t call me Harry,” I hissed as we passed the doorman, when Marcone helpfully put a hand on my waist to direct me to our table. “ _And stop touching me like that!_ ”

This was going to be a long night.

 

“Okay, I’ll bite,” I gave in at last. “Why me?”

We’d ordered our food and the menus had been cleared away, and now we were facing each other without distractions, without even any drinks to fiddle with yet. Yes, I know it’s uncouth to order the main dish before your drinks arrive, but damn it, I was hungry enough not to care. The waitstaff had given Marcone the royal treatment from the moment we walked in the door and we’d been led to a terribly cozy little booth, the circular kind that lets ardent lovers sit next to each other instead of forcing a cruel table between them.

Though frankly, I would have liked the breathing space that a table could give me, because that was about the time I realized that—whatever else Marcone might have up his sleeve—this really was an actual _date_. Fancy dinner, check. Polite (or in our case, mostly polite) small talk, check. Elevated standards of grooming, check. It wasn’t like he was invading my personal space significantly more than usual, but thanks to the seating I kept catching just a hint of his cologne, something _really sexy_ that gave me the visceral, overwhelming urge to crawl into his lap and nuzzle his neck. Down, boy.

Marcone raised his eyebrows in polite inquiry. “Why not you?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe I just don’t understand why a guy who could have supermodels sent up with the room service would bother taking my scruffy self out for dinner and a movie.”

His lips quirked to a smile, and from the gleam that lit his eyes I could tell he was laughing inside. “How does the saying go…? ‘In the dark, all cats are black.’”

“Ah…” I managed, wondering if I was blushing.

Alright, so not only was this a _date_ date, but the possibility of bedroom shenanigans was already on Marcone’s mind. Which made two of us, although I wasn’t at all sure I wanted to acknowledge that.

He smiled benevolently and dropped his attention to adjust his cufflinks, politely taking the heat off of me. “Furthermore, you seem to be holding both your company and your own good looks in very low esteem. If I didn’t know better, I might think you were fishing for compliments.”

“I’m not,” I muttered. Though yeah, since we were on the subject, I was feeling a little outclassed and would have liked some reassurance. I’d been more comfortable when I was waiting for him to trot out the business propositions or the assassination attempts, and didn’t that say nice things about my social life?

“Do give yourself _some_ credit, Mr. Dresden. Let’s just say that all cats are equal in the dark, but not at the dinner table. You shouldn’t find it so hard to believe that I prefer your company to that of an over-coiffed, undereducated girl half my age.”

Oh, that we could all be so jaded to charms of fantastically beautiful women. Fortunately the waitress chose that moment to stage a timely intervention with our drinks, and I managed to change the subject.

“So, what movie are we seeing?” I asked.

“ _La Belle Dame sans Merci_. It’s about a French Pre-Raphaelite painter.”

“Hmph.” I supposed it had been too much to hope for that Marcone would deign to join the unwashed masses for the latest Bond flick. “Sounds… artsy.”

“Let yourself be pleasantly surprised,” he suggested.

“Tell me, were you always this highbrow with your taste in cinema, or did they teach art appreciation at your ‘How to Pretend Like You’re Not a Thug’ seminars?”

Far from being insulted, Marcone laughed like I’d said something genuinely witty and leaned back, casually dropping an arm across the back of my seat in the process. It was smoothly done, I had to admit, much smoother than I’d ever been when attempting that maneuver.

“A little of both, I think,” he replied thoughtfully. “A lot of my business contacts are old money, and they like to thumb their noses at people who aren’t fluent in their pretensions. I deemed it a wise investment to broaden my cultural horizons, and wound up rather enjoying it. Perhaps you would too.” He took a sip of his martini, studying me over the rim of the glass. “How about a wine-tasting? I believe even you could appreciate that.”

“If you’re trying to bribe me, buddy, get in line,” I muttered, not bothering take umbrage at the ‘even you’ jibe. Seriously, with everything that I’d been offered from various bad-guy factions in the past, I could have set myself up with a Playboy mansion in southern France years ago—hell, I probably could have bought France. It was one of the many things I tried not to dwell on, because when I thought about how much more pleasant my life could be if I were just a _tiny_ bit less moral, it made me want to cry.

“Not a bribe,” Marcone chided. “I prefer to think of it as a pleasant outing between…” There was a pause, in which he evidently decided he couldn’t get away with calling us ‘friends.’ “…acquaintances who can usually manage to stay civil with each other.”

And even that was putting it generously.

I was once again saved from having to answer by the arrival of the waitstaff, this time not one, but three. The first woman produced a small towel and a bucket of ice and laid them on the table with a flourish, while the next man stepped up to hand the head guy a bottle of champagne.

“For Mr. Marcone, compliments of Mr. Howard,” the waiter pronounced with a flourish and a small bow. “He would like to thank you for your invaluable recent assistance, and expresses his hope that you and your companion are enjoying a pleasant evening.”

Sure enough, I looked up and found a set of diners across the room watching the proceedings at our table with amusement—a well-groomed, white-haired man and a stunning young woman who was dressed (or should I say, under-dressed) like she would be appearing on the cover of _Maxim_. When he saw that he’d succeeded in getting our attention, he lifted a hand in a cheery little wave.

“Well, you can tell Mr. Howard and his _granddaughter_ that we said ‘thanks,’” I informed him acidly.

The poor waiter looked scandalized, and more than a little alarmed at having to be the bearer of such a message. He glanced to Marcone for his cue, obviously hoping he would contradict me, but Marcone was valiantly trying to suppress his mirth and just gave the waiter an unhelpful wave off in Howard’s direction.

“Do you want to take your arm off the back of my seat now?” I grumbled when the waiter was gone.

“Not particularly.”

“Aren’t you worried about what your”—I groped for a word, gesturing in Mr. Howard’s general direction—“business associates will think of you taking another man out on a date?”

“A little,” he admitted easily, though he seemed rather zen about the whole thing. “Less worried now than I would have been five years ago, although there are still elements who could stir up trouble if they took exception to my personal relationships.”

“Then why risk it?” I asked. John Marcone had always been, if nothing else, eminently practical.

He turned to look at me then, with those light, searching eyes of his that seemed to push aside the veneer of sarcasm that I habitually hid behind until they came to rest on something that made them soften.

“Because some things are worth it,” he said quietly, in a tone that I hadn’t heard in a long time.

I met his eyes, the way I could with hardly everyone else, and the raw honesty I saw there silenced whatever wise-ass remark I’d had in the offing. This was Marcone without his armor, without his masks, and for a moment I felt that crazy, breathless sense of _possibility_. The moment when you suddenly look up and realize that the terrain has shifted beneath your feet, and you’re not quite sure _what_ you think of this person but suddenly it’s not what you’d thought it was. That all at once you can see the future branching in directions you’d never considered before, and you have no idea where they’ll take you and you feel like you’re one misstep away from free-fall, but suddenly it doesn’t seem like falling would be so bad.

In the same voice he continued, “And at this juncture, I think the benefits outweigh the risks.”

I blinked. Now I’m no Casanova when it comes to the art of sweet nothings, but I didn’t think they were supposed to involve that sort of cost/risk analysis. It thoroughly broke the mood and I grated out a sigh, annoyed despite myself, when I ought to have been thankful that he’d brought me back my senses.

“Wow, you sure know how to make a guy feel special.” To cover my annoyance I took a swig of the top shelf gin-and-tonic that my taste buds were no doubt far too low-brow to properly appreciate.

I wasn’t looking at Marcone, but I heard him huff something that might have been a laugh and his hand dipped down to idly toy with my hair. “Not my intention, I assure you.”

I swallowed hard. I was going to kill Murphy the next time I saw her. _Oh, what could Marcone possibly want with_ _ **you**_ _, Harry? You’re being stupid and paranoid, Harry. Go with him and find out what he wants, Harry._

“I have to use the men’s room,” I said, sounding strangled.

Marcone watched me scramble out of the booth, radiating amusement. “If you’re contemplating running away and sticking me with the check, I believe the optimal time to do that is _after_ you’ve eaten,” he suggested. “Also, that I’m paying regardless.”

I, the height of wit and refinement, gave him the finger and beat a hasty retreat.

Putting some distance between us helped, and even though I hadn’t needed the restroom for its customary purpose, I took the opportunity to splash a helpful dose of cold water on my face. Then I looked up at the mirror, at the lines of water dripping toward my chin, and gave myself a testy glare.

“Breathe, Harry, breathe.” I was comfortable talking to myself because I’d already established that no one else was in the bathroom to overhear my crazy. “You’re just on a date with John _criminal mastermind_ Marcone, no reason to get all jittery. And I am so going to kill Murphy.”

It’s funny to catch yourself in the mirror at the precise moment of an epiphany, just to see that dumb, poleaxed expression dawning on your own face. Because two things had just occurred to me in quick succession.

 _There’s been no suggestion that Marcone bats for home team_ , Murphy had said, which was true but didn’t actually mean a damned thing—because if he did, you can be sure he would have taken meticulous care to keep that information under wraps. Not because I thought he’d be ashamed of it, seeing as Marcone was pretty freaking shameless about everything else, but because there was no profit in letting that fact become common knowledge. To Marcone, “out and proud” wouldn’t even factor into the equation. Furthermore—and this was the kicker, epiphany number two—I had seen inside the man’s head. I knew that everything he _did_ was governed by cost/risk analysis.

So even _if_ he had been secretly carrying a torch for me these past however many years—a theory I still wasn’t sold on, by the way—the fact that he hadn’t pursued it until now meant that he’d decided it wasn’t worth the risk. Risks including (but not limited to) the possibility of humiliating rejection, the loss of his colleagues’ respect for him, the resultant erosion of his authority, and the increased likelihood of death by dismemberment from the monsters that tended to follow me around. Whereas benefits included… what? Bedroom hijinks that he could get from any number of other, less dangerous people? The singular pleasure of my company? I didn’t buy for a moment that either of those were enough to tip the scales for Marcone.

I left the bathroom, but dawdled on my way back to the table. Marcone wasn’t visible on the approach but Howard’s table was, and my eyes inexorably settled on the white-haired man again. The girl was chattering away, but Howard didn’t seem to be paying her the slightest attention, his brow furrowed as he gazed intently off into the distance. It took me only a few steps to realize that it was _our_ table he watched so closely, his cool, cautious regard suggesting that he was as curious as I was to discover what game Marcone was playing.

Howard wasn’t even considering the idea that Marcone might actually be gay, for the same reason that Murphy hadn’t—because if he were, he wouldn’t have done it like this. There was no reason for Marcone to flaunt me so publicly when he could have managed the whole thing a lot more discreetly.

Unless…

Unless he wanted someone to believe that he was on close, dare we say _intimate_ terms with Harry Dresden, Chicago’s resident wizard-errant. This wasn’t the first time he’d wanted to be seen schmoozing with me in public, because it could only help his reputation to let people think that he had me on his string, but that hadn’t been in the context of a _date_. This was the first time he’d been willing to risk alienating his less supernaturally-minded colleagues to make it happen.

Which begged the question: what had changed?

 

Answers weren’t forthcoming when I returned to the table, but steak was, so I was perfectly willing to set aside the issue of Marcone’s impenetrable motivations and eat. The first bite that I sank my teeth into was far and away the best thing that I had eaten in living memory, like Christmas and birthdays and all the sex that I wasn’t having rolled into one and served on a plate with garlic potatoes. I could have inhaled it in five minutes flat, and I had to force myself to slow down and savor it, juicy and bursting with flavor and so perfectly cooked that it seemed to melt on the tongue. At that moment, if there had been a contract on the table that let me sell my soul away to Marcone in exchange for feeding me like this every day, I’d have had it signed and stamped before you could even finish saying _Harry Blackstone Copperfield Dresden._

Marcone must have been kicking himself for not thinking of this years ago.

It was so good that I was disappointed when my appetite began to wane, because I could have kept going forever. When I’d graduated from _satisfied_ and was edging into _uncomfortably full_ , I finally conceded defeat and leaned back in my chair to enjoy the feeling.

“You know, I think that was the best meal I’ve had all year,” I said wonderingly. “Thank you.”

I had the pleasure of seeing Marcone caught, for once, wordless in his surprise, and I confess I felt a little smug about it. See, Harry Dresden isn’t too proud to show some well-deserved gratitude.

“You’re welcome,” he said at last. He sounded as though he’d never expected to say those words to me without a heavy frosting of sarcasm on top, and wasn’t sure whether to savor it while it lasted or pinch himself.

He wasn’t quite finished eating, so I watched him and kicked around all the stupid and/or inappropriate questions in my head until I found an acceptable one.

“So this is an _actual_ date, huh?” I asked lamely.

Marcone lifted his gaze to me, his previous expression shifting seamlessly into his game face before I could identify it. “What did you think it was?”

I shrugged. “One of your games. I figured you were after something else.”

“There’s nothing that says I’m not,” he agreed easily. “But tell me, would you have agreed to come if you hadn’t suspected me of ulterior motives?”

“No,” I shot back promptly. “Of course not.”

“Why not?” As if that were a reasonable question.

“Oh, I don’t know—because you’re not my type? Seeing as I don’t date murderers, drug dealers, or criminals if I can avoid it.”

“I notice you don’t include ‘men’ in that damning list of indictments,” Marcone observed, none-too-subtle interest quickening in his eyes.

Yes, he _would_ fixate on that. “Still doesn’t do you much good.”

“That remains to be seen. Though I assume that when you call me a murderer, you do so from the moral high ground of never having taken a life yourself.” His smile was pointed, since he knew full well that wasn’t the case. “Ah, forgive me, that was unfair—in your dangerous line of work, it is important to take mitigating circumstances into consideration. Excluding self-defense, then.”

“How about killing monsters that would have wiped out life as we know it?” I asked tartly. “By your reckoning, does killing them count as self-defense?”

As soon as the words left my mouth I knew I had made a misstep, because Marcone’s eyes had taken on that same dangerous light I’d come to recognize from Lasciel, that I’d set my first foot on the road they wanted me to be walking. Oh Harry—when will you learn to stop picking fights with these people?

“International non-aggression treaties would disagree,” Marcone said mildly. “But by my reckoning? Most certainly. Preemptive self-defense is definitely allowed, and in many cases the lack of it would be foolish, fatal, or both. But leaving that particularly thorny ethical matter aside, what about creatures that have already killed? Do you consider yourself justified in being judge, jury, and executioner in one?”

Now we were getting perilously close to his K.O. argument. I was an indifferent chess player at best, but I could see his next moves—I would point out that the supernatural beasties I killed could hardly get sent up before a court of law, and he would point out that many of the scumbags he’d offed had their own brand of judicial immunity. Much like himself.

“Maybe not, but after getting rid of them, I don’t inherit the business and pick up where they left off. Gosh, that might make me, oh, _as bad as they were_.”

“You think it cheapens the virtue of the deed because I have more to gain from it than simple public welfare?”

“I don’t think there’s any _virtue_ in what you do at all!” I said hotly, then checked myself when I realized that our argument was attracting some attention. In a lower voice I continued, “I don’t think public welfare ever comes into your calculations—you knock off your enemies to secure your own power base, and when that coincidentally makes the city safer, you’re happy to take credit because it makes you look like such a nice guy.”

I’d struck a nerve somewhere in that mess, because Marcone’s eyes had narrowed dangerously and he didn’t seem to be finding me very endearing at all anymore. For a split second I thought he was going to get up and walk out. Then he visibly brought himself under control, drawing in a deep breath and taking his eyes off me to focus out across the dining room.

“Fine,” he said evenly, his voice almost light except for a cold note that had been known to turn even hardened gangsters’ guts into jello. “If that’s what you insist on believing, then it’s a waste of your time and my dignity to attempt to convince you otherwise.”

“Ten bucks and the carriage parked out back says you have no dignity,” I muttered.

It was a classic example of mouth working faster than brain and I was regretting the words the moment they hit the air, because Marcone was already pissed off and the last thing I needed was to goad him into letting me settle my own bill here. But, inexplicably, the tension ratcheted down a few notches and he gave me a wink and a conspiratorial smile.

“Yes, well—the sacrifices we make for love.” Before I could recover my stunned wits and formulate a reply, he signaled the waiter and asked, “So, do you think you’re up for dessert?”

 

We didn’t bring up any more contentious topics for the rest of dinner, where the steak was followed by a slice of lemon custard pie the size of a pizza wedge, and tasted like it had been in the oven not five minutes before arriving on my plate. If the way to a man’s heart was through his stomach, Marcone had me but good.

He’d drawn me onto the topic of Sidhe legalese, which I was well-versed in even when I actively chose to flout it. Faeries can’t lie, of course, but they’re really good at distorting the truth. Over dessert and then over coffee I told him about some specific turns of phrase to look out for, and even let myself be coaxed into sharing a few of my more innocuous anecdotal experiences. Marcone was bound to get himself mixed up with the fae sooner or later, and it couldn’t hurt to let him know what he was in for.

Unfortunately my brain refused to let go of our earlier conversation, worrying it like a dog with a bone. I didn’t think he’d precisely won that round, but I didn’t feel like I’d properly made my point. I was willing to concede that he was better than the alternative—gangland anarchy—but that didn’t give him carte blanche to be everything short of that.

“Okay, so even if we say—for argument’s sake, this doesn’t mean I’m agreeing—that the ends justify the motives _and_ the means, then you can get away with killing rival gangsters, but there’s no way in hell you can justify trafficking heroin.”

We were just climbing back into the carriage (and I died a little inside every time I thought the word) when my mouth finally unloaded the argument that my brain had been formulating for the better part of half an hour. We had more privacy this time, since the temperature had dropped after sunset and Marcone consented to put the top up. That was probably for the best, because it never seemed to sit well with Hendricks to watch me arguing with his boss. I didn’t know whether it was because he hadn’t figured out by now that I wasn’t, in fact, going to hurt Marcone, or whether he was just itching to teach me some respect, but needless to say, trigger-happy thugs make me as nervous as I make them.

Marcone’s eyebrows rose at my abrupt reopening of a topic that we’d tacitly agreed to close. “Oh?” he said expectantly.

“Do you have any idea how many lives are destroyed by drugs? We’re talking about innocents here, little more than kids. I shouldn’t even have to tell you this, but do you want me to put a human face on it? My apprentice had a couple of friends who’d gotten themselves hooked on heroin, and in this town, odds are dollars to donuts they got it from one of your suppliers. The girl’s name was Rosie—eighteen years old, homeless, been pregnant twice and miscarried the first time because of the drugs. She couldn’t hold down a job except to get enough money for her next fix. Are you going to tell me _that’s_ in the public’s best interest?”

Marcone was silent, light from the streetlamps sliding like liquid over the sharp, handsome angles of his profile. He looked pensive and stately, and not for the first time I cursed a world that makes the bad guys invariably so much better-looking than the good guys.

“What?” I demanded. “Don’t tell me you’ve got no clever retort to that.”

He turned slightly, raising an eyebrow, the corner of his lips drawing into a hard smile. “Why Harry, what could I possibly say in my defense? It was unconscionable of me to hold down that poor girl and force the needle into her arm.” Then his eyes widened with theatrical surprise. “Oh, _wait_.”

“She was barely more than a child,” I said tightly. “She couldn’t have known what she was getting into, and by the time she did, it was too late.”

“Gracious me, drugs are dangerous? Someone ought to make them illegal, so children can’t take them by accident. Oh, _wait_.” The smile was gone as if it never had been, and Marcone’s eyes were fixed on me with that eerily level stare.

“Look, it’s a stupid mistake, but not one they deserve to die for—”

“People die from stupid mistakes every day,” Marcone cut in coldly. “That’s the danger of having free will—that there will _always_ be some people who choose poorly. Now I don’t disagree with your fundamental optimism about humanity; I do believe that most people, given the chance, are happy to lead safe, honest, and productive lives. But there will always be some who choose not to, and you know what, Mr. Dresden? _You can’t save them._ Neither could I, not even if I shut down every dealer in my employ this very evening.

“Because people _want_ to make this mistake. They go to ridiculously dangerous lengths to keep making it and moreover, they pay hand over fist for the privilege. And as long as there’s a demand, someone _will_ be there to supply it, you can count on that. If I make sure it’s me, I can at least limit the damage. No bloody turf wars, no innocents caught in the crossfire, no pushers loitering outside elementary schools. You can’t save these people from themselves, but I can make sure they don’t drag the rest of my city down with them.”

“Ah, my bad,” I said, my voice dripping with sarcasm. “So you’ve actually got _public welfare_ at heart when you throw these kids under the bus. Thanks for clearing that up for me.”

He didn’t bat an eye. “I don’t expect you to like it. _I_ don’t particularly like it. It’s an inelegant solution, but it’s necessary and I suspect you understand that better than you’d like to.”

“Oh do I?” I challenged.

“Yes, I think you do,” he said, turning more fully and reaching across me to plant his hand against the door, effectively closing me in. His face was inches from mine, his expression startlingly intense and his voice when he spoke was as low and intimate as a caress. “You see, you live in a world more like mine than you care to admit—where the difference between right and wrong isn’t always as clear cut as TV tells us it should be, where sometimes even the best choice is a bad one, but someone still has to make it.”

If we’d had a referee present, that arm-across-the-seat maneuver would have drawn a foul. I completely lost track of what I was going to say, my thoughts scattering like... like something that scatters very quickly. He was close, so close that it would have been easier to kiss him than not to, and I heard myself suck in a breath, my skin all at once too hot and too tight and too _conscious_ of him. I closed my eyes, trying to block him out so I could think, only to nearly lose it—with my eyes closed he suddenly seemed to be _everywhere_ , the strength and warmth and scent of him all around me.

“The lesser of two evils is still, by definition, evil,” I said at last, meeting his eyes and somehow managing to sound like I was in complete control of myself. “You’re never going to sell me on this, Marcone.”

“I’m not trying to.” He smiled faintly and shook his head, eyes dropping to rake a heated gaze over my face. He shifted and leaned closer, and I shivered at the faint brush of his breath on my cheek as he spoke. “Because despite what you may think, I don’t want to corrupt you. Your power would be frankly terrifying if misapplied—as I know you’re well aware. I think that’s why you’re so afraid of moral gray areas, of doing anything that you perceive as the first step on a slippery slope. It’s why you need friends like your knight of the cross and your righteous Sergeant Murphy, people who can drag you back to the right path if you start to stray.”

Before I could interrupt, Marcone lifted his hand and pressed his fingers against my lips.

“But sometimes,” he continued, his voice going a notch lower, “you also need people like me. Someone who can make the hard decisions, who can do what _someone_ has to, because if I don’t then someone worse will. You’re a good man, Harry, but in many ways you are stunningly predictable. You’ve let your morality become your weakness because you wear it on your sleeve for all to see, and your enemies hamstring you with it _every time_. You need someone on your side who isn’t hampered by conventional morality, and I make no apologies for being that person.”

I swallowed. Even if my brain hadn’t reacted to that voice and enthusiastically decided to redistribute blood for sexy-fun-times instead of rational-thinking-times, there was little doubt that Marcone had won this round.

“I fight dirty, Harry,” he murmured. “But I’m fighting for my city. My people. And for you.”

I blinked, realizing a beat too late that he’d finished and it was my turn to either rebut or sit there gaping unattractively.

“So, basically… you’re volunteering to be the bad cop to my good cop?” Ah, sarcasm, my tireless refuge, my steadfast friend when all others have deserted me.

That drew a chuckle from Marcone and some of that paralyzing, predatory intent eased. “Mr. Dresden, I believe that’s the first time anyone has likened me to a member of law enforcement, bad or otherwise, and will probably be the last. Though in essence, yes, that is what I’m proposing.”

Wait, what? He’d made a proposal? I’d lost the thread of what he was talking about ages ago; he could have started rambling about cattle futures in that dangerously seductive tone and I wouldn’t have noticed. Okay, snap out of it, Harry—stop letting your downstairs brain steal the show.

I put out a hand to push him back so I’d have space to think. He didn’t let himself be pushed, so I found myself with my hand resting flat against the hard planes of his chest, feeling the warmth of his skin and the beat of his heart beneath my palm. Ohh, nice—in the dangerous way.

“So were we going to see a movie, or what?” I asked flippantly, while my treasonous hand apparently decided it was happy staying parked on Marcone’s chest.

He blinked, but otherwise didn’t move. “Do you want to?”

Versus saying to hell with the movie and skipping straight to sex? “Uhm…”

“You did say that you weren’t expecting this to be an actual date,” Marcone reminded me. “Considering that I seem to have lured you here under false pretenses, I would be willing to take you home now— _if_ that’s what you wanted.”

Here it was then, moment of truth. Stay, without the excuse of business any longer, and admit that I was here for no other reason than because I wanted to be—or do what any responsible good guy ought to and tell the bad guy to get lost.

Well, what the heck. In for a penny, in for a pound, as Ebenezar liked to say.

“Movie sounds good,” I said gamely.

“Are you going to stop picking fights?”

When they ended with Marcone in my lap and me hard enough to hammer nails? “Why would I want to do that?”

Marcone seemed to pick up on the subtext in that, for he quirked a smile. “Point.”

The contained triumph in his expression wasn’t exactly reassuring, but he (finally!) withdraw his arm and moved back to his side of the carriage, giving me both the physical and the metaphorical space I needed to clear my head while I reacquainted myself with breathing.

Marcone leaned forward and slid open a small panel that let him talk to the driver. “Hendricks? We’re ready for the movie now.”

He glanced behind him and smiled at me, sly and proprietary.

Well damn the icebergs, I decided, and full speed ahead. I found it in me to smile back.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I take some minor liberties with canon. Later, I shall throw it up against the wall and have my way with it. For now, cue the PLOT.

From the speed with which we arrived at the theater after that, I had reason to believe that the driver had been circling it while Marcone and I came to an agreement. That was less embarrassing than believing that he’d been waiting for us to finish something _else_ in the privacy of the carriage.

We got off at the curb, where buoyant early-evening crowds were gathered in clumps on the sidewalk outside the theater. If anything, our entrance at the film center drew even more stares than at it had at Morton’s, but I was either distracted or jaded to it now and it didn’t bother me so much anymore. There also seemed to be a higher concentration of tourists, who probably assumed that we were two more of the same. There was comfort in anonymity.

After the red-carpet treatment we’d received at Morton’s, there was something comfortingly normal and nostalgic about going to the movie theater, even if there was a fancy French art movie waiting for us inside. We were immediately engulfed in the laughing, talking crowd when we got in line to pick up our tickets; I could still spot Hendricks and another bodyguard-type if I looked for them, but they were keeping a discreet distance.

In fact, the only thing making me uncomfortable now was the hunch that anyone who took a glance at the two of us would immediately peg us as out on a date. Arguably I’d been out on a date all evening, but as Marcone had aptly put it, I’d been there under false pretenses. Now that I’d agreed that this was a _date_ date, I was feeling suddenly self-conscious.

Hey, cut me some slack, I was still warming up to this whole dating-a-guy thing, okay?

“What time does the movie start?” I asked Marcone, glancing at my watch just to have something to fiddle with.

“Just before nine, I believe.”

I took another guilty glance around the crowd, and in doing so realized that exactly nobody was paying as much attention to us as I was to them. Nobody was shooting wide-eyed stares at Marcone and whispering behind their hands. Nobody was looking at me like they were about to pull an Uzi—or its supernatural equivalent—out of a baby carriage and start mowing down pedestrians. Marcone and I were, bizarre as the idea was, _passing for normal._

He seemed content to leave me to my own thoughts as we gradually drew closer to the ticket box, and then took the lead once we were there. He had apparently reserved our tickets over the phone, under the innocuous ‘John.’ The twenty-something working the booth produced our tickets with greater competence than her nose-ring would have suggested—though perhaps I shouldn’t have been so catty, considering the number of new piercings that my apprentice turned up with every time I saw her—and gave Marcone a warm smile. Then, even though I had said nothing at all through this transaction, she gave me a meaningful, knowing smile as well.

Yeah okay, I _so_ wasn’t ready for this.

It was on the tip of my tongue to comment on the matter to Marcone, because this whole gay date thing was just crazy, and I was bursting to share the crazy with _someone_ , but I had the uncanny hunch that whatever he said would just make it weirder.

Then my eye caught his and I realized that he was thinking the exact same thing, and we found ourselves both laughing out loud without a word spoken.

“Ah, I am glad you have a sense of humor, Mr. Dresden,” Marcone remarked as we went inside, with something in his tone that sounded suspiciously like affection. “I suspect this whole business of liking you would be much more tedious, otherwise.”

“Likewise.” Then, realizing what I’d said, I hastened to add, “In the extremely hypothetical situation that I actually liked you or something.”

“Of course.”

The lobby was noisy and crowded, and Marcone’s accursed hand found its way to my waist again so that he could lean in closer and speak in a low tone that wouldn’t carry. “Though you know, Harry, if this is what you get up to with men that you _don’t_ like, then I’m quite curious to know what you would do with a man whom you did.”

“I, uhm,” I managed, feeling my toes curl at his low, smoky voice in my ear and trying to come up with something a little more intelligent than, _Hey look! Over there! Please to be distracted while I run away now!_ “I think I might hold hands with him. And let him call me Harry, which you, for the record, are still totally not allowed to do.”

Marcone’s hand tightened briefly and possessively on my hip, apparently considering it permission granted when I forgot to explicitly include public manhandling on that list, and he smiled as he nudged us into motion toward our theater. “I’m not sure how I’ll live with my disappointment.”

“Oh, I’m sorry, did you _want_ to hold hands?”

“Not especially, no.”

“Of course. Because putting your hand in the ass pocket of my jeans is _so_ much classier.”

“Mr. Dresden, despite my best efforts this evening, I’m not sure you would recognize class if it crawled down your trousers to join your blasting rod.” Then he stepped back to allow me through the narrow doorway, before I could formulate a reply to what I was pretty sure had been a dick joke.

We weren’t in the _very_ back row, but we were close, and though the theater was somewhat full, we were the only people in our row. Or in either of the rows adjacent for that matter, except for a pair of thugs who were obviously here on account of us.

“Marcone,” I gritted out. “Tell me you had nothing to do with buying out three whole rows just so we could have ‘alone time.’” Air-quotes included.

“I’m sure I have no idea what you mean,” he replied, entirely and unconvincingly innocent, settling his hand on my thigh.

“And I’m sure you have no idea how _that_ keeps ending up in my lap either,” I said, picking up his hand and removing it from my leg. Then I put the armrest down between us, a clear signal that there was to be no funny business.

Marcone gave me an amused, indulgent glance, like who did I think I was kidding, and flipped it right back up.

Fortunately, that was about when the movie started. I found myself silently and fervently thanking the powers that be that ‘dinner and a movie’ was the traditional date, because it meant I wouldn’t have to keep sparring with Marcone. Ordinarily it was a—well, not a _pleasure_ , per se, but it was considerably less nerve-wracking when I wasn’t wondering whose bed I might end up in later.

We watched the previews, where they showed—I swear, just to taunt me—the newest Bond flick that I _wasn’t_ watching, and then the movie started in earnest.

And... it wasn’t that bad. I _know_ I’m a philistine and I _know_ it’s not something you’re supposed to admit in polite company, but I don’t like subtitled movies. I don’t read fast enough and I feel like I spend the whole time watching the bottom of the screen instead of getting to watch the actors.

So it was a pleasant surprise that this movie, despite the pretentious title, was actually in English. It was set in France, and perhaps it should have been more distracting than it was that all the allegedly French characters spoke English with a pseudo-British accent instead, but I wasn’t complaining. The story was about an aspiring painter who, despite being married, falls hard for one of his models and is trying to reconcile his sincere but passionless love for his wife with everything that the other woman makes him feel. Not the most original plot in the world, but the writing was snappy and the characters were surprisingly sympathetic.

Ten or fifteen minutes in, I was surprised to discover that I was actually sort of enjoying myself. I don’t go to movies often, and when I do I tend to slouch as a matter of self-defense, so the people behind me don’t throw concessions at my big, sticking-up head. There was no one behind us now but apparently the habit died hard, because I’d ended up sliding down in my seat anyway. Marcone’s arm somehow found its way behind me again and I wound up leaning against his shoulder, his head coming to rest against mine. It was nice; companionable, even. I was beginning to think that maybe there was something to this funny idea of his that we could be friends or... something.

Onscreen, the artist and his muse were coming together to work for the first time. She was unabashedly naked, as only art films can get away with showing, while he sketched out the first, rough outlines of the vision he had conceived in his mind. They were across the room from each other but the atmosphere was practically electrified with the attraction between them. His gaze raked over her curves while he sketched out their echo, the tip of his pencil stroking over the paper with all the intimacy of a caress.

I shifted discreetly in my seat, hoping Marcone wouldn’t notice. All at once, what had been companionable before had suddenly become charged with the same taut, sensual awareness that was playing out onscreen. I was abruptly conscious of his presence, his shoulder beneath my head, of how _close_ he was . It would be so easy to turn my head and— 

His fingers landed unexpectedly on the curve of my neck, dragging a weighted caress across my exposed skin. 

I jumped, sucking in a sharp breath, and suddenly I couldn’t even hear the movie over the pounding of my own heart. My skin seemed to tingle where he touched it, his body hot against mine, and I could feel his chest move when he hitched in a breath. 

_Oh, well played, Marcone,_ I thought tartly, breathing through my teeth. Because I wasn’t so dumb that I couldn’t see this was exactly what he’d planned, but it was still working beautifully. And unless I wanted to get up and walk out in the middle of the movie, I was going to be spending the next two hours in a state of semi-permanent arousal while John Marcone—who was about as much of a gentleman as  I was a lady—laid siege. 

And he was hardly even _doing_ anything. Never pushing too far, he simply let his hand play idly over my shoulder, occasionally stroking his thumb against my neck; a gentle presence that nevertheless made damned sure I wasn’t going to forget about him. But every time the pair onscreen got hot and heavy, I could feel the weight of his regard on me—and they did that  _a lot_ . 

I was paying progressively less attention to the movie, instead thinking—in alarmingly graphic detail—about dragging Marcone into some dark corner and having it off with him right up against the wall. Somehow I didn’t think his dignity would extend so far as to refuse  _that_ , not with his heartbeat matching mine and the pressure of his fingertips on my shoulder growing increasingly insistent. 

I could picture it with crystal clarity in my head, and I wanted it so badly that I had to clench my teeth to keep from reaching for him. I wanted his hands on me, all over me, wanted his body pushed hard against me while our mouths kissed hot and fast and hungry. 

_Hell’s bloody bells, it has been way too long since you got laid, Harry Dresden_ , I schooled myself sharply, desperately trying to get some kind of rein on a situation that was rapidly spiraling out of control.

Because seriously, the  _last thing_ I needed was to get arrested for public indecency in the back of a movie theater with John Marcone. Never mind that he could probably pay off the cops before the story saw the light of day; it was the principle of the thing.

I turned my head to him, fully prepared to ask him to  _stop_ , but then our eyes locked and the words never materialized. Everything I’d been thinking, I saw it reflected on his face, and suddenly I knew, beyond any shadow of a doubt,  that all I had to do was give the word and we could be ripping each other out of our clothes like horny teenagers—a plan that my downstairs brain vigorously endorsed. Marcone was many things, but no one could deny that the man was smoking hot, least of all me and least of all now. 

Then he was dropping his head and leaning in closer, and I realized just a split second before it happened that he intended to kiss me. I dodged it just in time, acting on instinct, since I couldn’t even remember why I was supposed to—I knew there was a reason why I shouldn’t kiss him, some very good, very _pressing_ reason even though I couldn’t be bothered to remember it just then. Something to do with evil monsters or saving the world or whatever. Marcone recovered seamlessly, choosing instead to smooth back the hair from my temples and lay a kiss there. 

I swallowed, hard. “I thought you wanted to watch the movie,” I whispered pointedly. 

“I’ve seen it before,” he murmured in reply, barely audible.

Of course he had. Like he would leave this up to chance. 

By the time the movie ended, I had spent the better part of an hour fighting not to come up with justifications for why it would be totally okay to sleep with Marcone. I mean, I wasn’t _stupid_ , right? Surely I could keep (incredibly hot) bedroom shenanigans from impairing my judgment about the man in other arenas, re: him being a super villain and all, which was about as far as I got before getting derailed with speculation about said shenanigans.

Marcone took his arm off my chair when the lights came halfway up, but neither of us moved as the other audience members began stirring to leave. I was still staring fixedly at the movie screen, scrolling credits that I wasn’t reading, because I was positive that if I looked at Marcone the only thing out of my mouth would be, _So, your place or your other place? Or_ _ **right here**_ _?_

“Do you need a moment, Mr. Dresden?” Marcone inquired politely, sleek satisfaction in every word.

“Oh no, I’m just enthralled by the credits,” I said, pleased by how level my voice came out. “No movie viewing experience is complete without knowing who the best boy is.”

“The director’s nephew,” Marcone answered easily, but mercifully left it at that and didn’t complain while we waited it out.

I forced myself to read the text onscreen, which helped a lot because nothing bores you to a stupor quite like a list of unfamiliar names and incomprehensible job titles. By the time we discovered who the best boy was (someone with the unfortunate name of Teddy Tickler) I was as recovered as I was going to get.

“I can’t believe you took me to see _softcore porn_ ,” I hissed as we left the theater. The shock of cold air that struck us as soon as we walked outside was a welcome dampener on my overheated libido.

Marcone’s innocent shrug was entirely unconvincing, visibly pleased with himself as he was. “Apologies—it was the best I could do on short notice. I could take you to a Disney film next time, if you prefer.” He stopped us at the curb and signaled to one of his unseen lackeys.

“No thank you,” I grumbled as the carriage pulled up, seemingly out of nowhere. The footman was on hand to open the door and I hoisted myself up, having mastered the knack of it despite myself. “And who said anything about a next time?”

“Well, we needn’t if you don’t want to,” Marcone said easily, settling into the seat next to me and chafing his hands together at the chill. “But after a satisfactory first date, a second date is usually the next logical step.” He favored me with his tiger’s smile. “And as I see it, this evening has been more than satisfactory. Wouldn’t you agree?”

“I—well, it hasn’t been _entirely_ unpleasant,” I allowed. “Apart from the public groping, and the horse-drawn carriage, and the bickering, and the softcore porn.”

“I’m very glad you enjoyed the steak,” Marcone said dryly.

I had my mouth open to follow up with another quip, but found myself closing it, feeling unexpectedly beholden to him.

“It wasn’t bad,” I made myself admit. “Not the steak, I mean, that was fantastic. I’m talking about all of this. This was the closest thing I’ve had to a real, honest-to-god date in...” Longer than I could remember, and I amended, “Or well, a real date that went according to plan, instead of getting gate-crashed by ghouls or something. Knock on wood. I think I’d forgotten what it felt like to be normal,” I finished with more bitterness than I’d intended.

Marcone, of all people, understood that. He nodded calmly. “The burden of power is the sacrifice of safety,” he said, as though it were something he’d thought about before. “You are a dangerous man to be close to, Mr. Dresden.”

I winced a little at those words, because it wasn’t like that had escaped my notice; I’d seen how often the people I cared about wound up in danger, or crippled, or dead. Even though I knew, intellectually, that it wasn’t my fault—that these people were adults, who made their own choices based on their own convictions. That was cold comfort, however, when a treacherous part of my mind kept whispering that if only I had stayed away from them, then Susan would still be human, then Michael would still be able to walk.

But Marcone stated it like a fact, with neither pity nor condemnation in his tone, and spared none for himself either when he continued, “As am I, in a different way. The only solution is to choose your friends and lovers wisely—people who can take care of themselves if the need arises.”

He met my eyes seriously, and I understood what he was saying but I couldn’t embrace that philosophy like he could. I wasn’t built that way. I couldn’t just _stop caring_ about people because I didn’t want it to hurt me when they died.

“I just want the bad guys to leave me alone,” I muttered, feeling petulant and probably sounding it too.

Marcone settled back, looking thoughtful. “And you know, I’m sure they’d like nothing better than for you to leave them alone as well. But given your predilection for being the champion of justice, both seem rather unlikely to happen.” A thought occurred to him and he gave an odd smile. “Perhaps you could fake your own death?”

I slouched further down into my seat and scrubbed my hand over my eyes. “Right, because _that_ would be real convincing.”

“You would be much safer if your enemies didn’t know you were alive,” he said, placing a subtly incongruous emphasis on those words.

A few moments passed in silence, the carriage bumping over the street more roughly than a car would have done, the sounds of traffic coming in much clearer.

“Marcone, _are_ you playing some deeper game with this date?” I finally asked, my eyes still closed. That wasn’t even what I’d been thinking about, the question just popped out. I peeked at him to see his reply.

“Yes,” he said simply.

I huffed out a sigh. “Am I ever going to find out what it is?” I asked, irritated but resigning myself to ignorance.

His eyes danced and his mouth twitched with the effort not to smirk. “Probably,” he said, his tone suggesting that would prove to be a _dramatic understatement._

I sighed again and sank another couple inches into the seat, feeling unaccountably demoralized. “So much for thinking that I’d been asked out because someone actually _liked_ me,” I grumbled, making a miserable stab at sarcasm and missing by a mile.

Because seriously, why was this my life? My last serious relationship had ended with a semi-dead ex-girlfriend. The dude that I was interested in turned out to be Luke to my Leia. The thing with Luccio had stalled and gone nowhere. And the only other women who’d hit on me lately had been a soul-eating succubus and a fallen freaking angel, both of them bent on turning me dark side. I mean, _come on_ —I was a fun guy, and not bad-looking so long as you didn’t line me up next to Thomas. Was it really too much to ask that someone _without_ ulterior motives try to trip me into bed?

“Harry,” Marcone said, lightly touching my wrist to get my attention, and incidentally heading off the self-pity train that had been barreling in. “Everything I’ve said of you is true.” He paused, then admitted with a wry smile, “Including the less flattering things. I may have a deeper game, as you put it, but the only thing it changed was the timing.”

“You’re not out and proud,” I said suspiciously, which probably only made sense in my head but Marcone seemed to understand what I was talking about.

“No, I’m not,” he agreed, his smile widening a fraction and the space between us rapidly shrinking. “But we seem to be _in_ right now.”

And suddenly it clicked, why I wasn’t supposed to be kissing anyone, let alone Marcone—see ‘White Court vampires, protection from,’ and the benefits of necking with your One True Love. At the last second I clapped my hand over Marcone’s mouth, with about as much finesse and tact as a garbage truck at the Ritz, and jerked back sharply.

“I’m celibate,” I blurted out, my brain still diverted by Marcone’s lips against my fingers. 

Above my hand his eyes grew vexed, and he took my wrist to remove it from his mouth. “I know for a fact that you are not,” he informed me with patent irritation. “If you must lie, do me the courtesy of making it a believable one.” 

“No, it’s not like that.” He hadn’t let go of my wrist, and my hand rested on the seat cushion, his covering it. I found it easier to stare at that than look him in the eye. “It’s just… the last person I slept with was… someone I cared about a lot.” 

Hell’s bells, I could hear Michael in my head again, railing at me to just out and _say it_ already, that I’d loved her. Only I hadn’t counted on how profoundly uncomfortable I would be with telling this to Marcone, who didn’t belong in the same county as conventional romance, much less the same ballpark. 

“Someone I loved,” I forced myself to say. Once the words were out, it became easier, as if I had uncorked something inside of me and now I could breathe. “I loved her a lot, and she loved me, and because she was the last person who kissed me, I’ve got a… an armor, of sorts, against certain kinds of supernatural creatures. White Court vampires can’t feed off me.” 

Marcone watched me with inscrutable eyes and said nothing. I couldn’t tell whether he believed me or not. 

“Which is not to say that I’m going to be celibate forever, because god I hope not, but it means I’m not going to sleep with anyone I’m not in love with,” I finished firmly, and breathed a mental sigh of relief. 

It was a relief because now I had a good reason _not_ to have sex with John Marcone, which if you had told me on Thursday morning I was going to need soon, I would have told you to get your head checked. Even going into the date I hadn’t expected it to get this far, since I knew that sleeping with him would be a Bad Idea, capital letters and all, but somewhere along the line, objections like “he’s an amoral, corrupt mob boss” or “Harry, you don’t actually know _how_ to have sex with men” had slipped down a couple notches on my list of priorities. I needed this jolt of reality to keep my head straight. No pun intended. 

Marcone had tipped his head slightly, and was giving me the appraising look that he always did when I accidentally slipped and gave away information pertaining to the supernatural—the only information he couldn’t send thugs out to collect for him. That look always made me feel like I was showing my cards, like I’d accidentally given away something I shouldn’t have and it was going to come back and bite me in the ass later. 

“Interesting,” he remarked at last, his voice mild. “That’s certainly not an excuse I’ve heard before.” 

“It’s true,” I insisted, feeling inexplicably stung. 

“Alright,” he said peaceably, although he didn’t sound like he believed me. He let go of my wrist and lifted his hand to place his fingers carefully on the hollow of my throat. “So what do I have to work with?”

“What?” In my defense, my brain was working on half-power again, so even ‘what’ seemed like a stellar accomplishment of clear and rational thinking.

“I’m not unreasonable, Harry.” He leaned in to breathe the words against my neck and a full-body shiver ran through me. “I’ve no more desire than you do to make you lose your White Court protection. But nor am I a martyr. So tell me… what exactly am I allowed to get away with?”

“Ahh…” I said coherently, my hands tightening on his arms.

That was a good question, actually. The White Court aversion to true love was common knowledge, but I didn’t know of anyone as lame as me who had managed to keep it going for so long after the object of that love was gone from their life.

The lips, probably, I thought, remembering Lara Raith trying to kiss me and coming away with blisters for her trouble. There was a whole truckload of associations between the mouth and magic, since it’s the source of speech and breath, and also where we receive sustenance. Made sense that it would be the focal point for magic like this as well, but I could already hear the _Pretty Woman_ jokes that would be coming my way if I said so.

“Uhm… I don’t know, but I don’t exactly want to mess with it. Immunity against White Court vampires isn’t something you want to give up just so you can fool around in the back of a horse… drawn… carriage…” 

I barely managed to finish that thought, my mouth working on autopilot by the end, because Marcone had delicately folded aside the collar of my coat and began kissing his way up my neck. His breath coasted across my skin, making me shiver, and his fingers dragging across my thigh were making my pants suddenly a size too small. 

Marcone’s mouth had reached my ear, tongue tracing lightly over the lobe. It produced exactly the reaction he’d known it would and I was twisting in my seat, pulling him closer and clenching my jaw to keep from groaning aloud. I was suddenly hard-pressed to remember why I didn’t want to have sex with Marcone in the backseat of a carriage, because right now it seemed like a _really great idea._

Marcone’s lips stopped at the line of my jaw, just below my ear. “So… do you love me yet?” he murmured, sounding intolerably amused as his fingers stroked over my neck. 

“Ah…” _Not yet, you’d better do that again!_ my hindbrain put in unhelpfully. 

But then, to equally powerful parts relief and disappointment, he was letting go of me, chuckling as he retreated to his seat again. He gave a sharp rap on the ceiling of the carriage, and immediately our anachronistic footman had opened the door for me and was holding it open. Behind him I could see the lights of my apartment building.

I looked to Marcone, who was still laughing, eyes dancing at my visible dismay. “Well, I wouldn’t wish to importune you any further this evening. Goodnight, Mr. Dresden.” 

“I—” I began, but short of throwing myself on him and saying, _oh god, please do, importune me all night long_ , what could I really do? I couldn’t afford to lose my protection against the White Court, enjoyable as I’m sure he could make it, not to mention the myriad other complications that would ensue. Gentleman John, cocktease extraordinaire—who would’ve thought?

“Right,” I said, ruffled. When Marcone just raised his eyebrows at me expectantly, I slid across the seat and climbed out. “See you later.” 

Marcone’s toothpaste ad smile gleamed in the semi-darkness. “I don’t doubt it.” 

And like a gentleman, his carriage waited at the curb until I was inside before leaving for parts unknown. It wasn’t until the next morning that I found out where he had gone, and how the other shoe had well and truly dropped.

 

I woke to the sound of construction, the brain-jarring, sleep-shattering hammer of a power drill beating away at something metal. I was roused enough to squint at the alarm clock beside my bed, ascertaining that it was just past six-ungodly-o’clock. Stars and stones, it should have been illegal to make such a racket at this time of morning. 

It took a moment, through the haze of rudely-interrupted sleep and the pounding of the drill, for two things to penetrate. First, that it _was_ illegal to begin construction this early. 

And second, that it was _**my front door**_ the power drill was working on. 

“Holy—!” I yelped, biting back a colorfully obscene (and anatomically improbable) oath that I’d picked up from Thomas during his residency here and tossing aside the covers to leap to my feet.

As I was frantically pawing through a pile of mostly-clean laundry, Mister stalked through, ears flattened against his head and glaring to let me know that he held me fully responsible for this acoustic disaster. I hastily threw on some clothes, intent on stopping whoever was trying to bust down my door before they either succeeded and blew themselves up on my wards, or succeeded and found me in my camo-print boxer shorts. 

At the door the racket was nearly deafening and I was also somewhat leery of opening it while the drill was going, since that seemed like a guaranteed way to make it go wide and skewer someone. Did I ever mention that I’m a bit technophobic? 

Fortunately, technology tends to be equally scared of me, so it was only a moment’s work to lean against the door and send a surge of my will and magic pulsing at the unwieldy machine on the other side. A few seconds later the engine sputtered and died, and I could hear its operator bitching at it even through the solid metal door. 

Satisfied that it wasn’t going to be doing any more drilling in the near future, I hoisted up my staff in one hand, and with the other holding my blasting rod, threw the bolt and heaved the door wide open. 

“Alright,” I said, leveling my blasting rod head-on at the would-be intruder. “Now’s the time when you decide you got the wrong house, buddy.” 

The man had been bending over to inspect the drill, but his head popped up fast enough when the door opened. He was stocky, a fair way past middle age, with dark skin and thinning gray hair. He also wore a pair of blue coveralls with “EMERSON CONSTRUCTION” emblazoned across the breast pocket, and was looking at me with blank surprise and confusion, but not a trace of the guilty panic that tends to accompany bad guys caught in the act. 

“You live here?” he asked, spending a few moments blinking before recovering his wits. 

“ _Yes_ , I live here!” I sputtered, incensed and more than a little confused myself. “What the hell do you think you’re doing, trying to take my door off its hinges?!” 

“Well don’t get on my case for it, mister!” he countered, back going up with indignation. “I’m only doing what the lady asked me to do.” 

“And you break open just any house that someone _asks_ you to?” I demanded. “If I weren’t terminally unlucky with lawyers I would sue you down to your—”

“I ain’t done nothing wrong,” he declared hotly. “We’re an independent construction company, working for the police, and if you don’t like it you can darn well take it up with them.” Washing his hands of me, he hoisted up the busted drill and started climbing the stairs. “HEY SERGEANT, WE GOTTA PROBLEM HERE!” 

“Wait, what?” And I’d thought I was confused before. “The police are the ones who want inside my house?” 

A figure appeared at the top of the stairs, silhouetted against the morning light, and I recognized Murphy’s compact stride before she had gone more than three steps. The man motioned her toward me with a disgusted wave and continued lugging the drill up the stairs.

“What kind of proble…” Halfway down the stairs her eyes fell on me and she trailed off, jerking to a stop as her eyes went huge and her face blanched dead white. 

“Harry?” she whispered, clutching the rail as she descended two more slow steps. Her eyes remained fixed to my face, as though afraid I would disappear if she looked away. “Oh my god, Harry is that you?” 

“Last I checked,” I answered with a stab at levity, though my confusion was rapidly transmuting into the creeping sense that something was very wrong. “That’s whose mail I keep getting, anyway.”

“Oh, _Harry!_ ” 

She pelted down the last few steps and hit me like a petite blond sack of bricks, throwing her arms around me and knocking her head against my chest. 

“Uhm, good morning to you too,” I said, patting her head awkwardly. Not that I minded having a cute girl wrapped around my midsection, but this wasn’t typical Murphy behavior at all.

She pulled her head back to gaze at me, scouring my face with eyes that looked tired and red from crying. Her head was shaking back and forth, silent denial to some thought she didn’t voice, and she didn’t take her eyes or her hands off me. 

“Jesus Christ, Harry,” she whispered. “What happened last night?” 

That gave me pause, because usually when trouble goes down spectacularly in this town, I’m well aware of it and more often than not in the thick of it. So it was a legitimate question—except that I didn’t remember anything that would put Murphy in such a state. 

“Uh… I wasn’t aware of anything happening last night. Whatever it was, I didn’t do it. Honest.” I tried flashing her a grin, but it didn’t take.

Murphy gave me a look like she was torn between laughing, calling me a moron, or breaking down crying. “With Marcone,” she said, in a strange, tight voice that sounded like she was keeping it together by her fingernails. “What happened when you were out with Marcone?” 

I had a sudden, visceral memory of his lips on my neck, the pressure of his fingers on my waist, and I colored. “Look Murph, I know we’re BFFs, but I’m really not the type to kiss and tell—which is not to say that there was any kissing going on, of course! I meant—” 

“Damn it, Harry!” she burst out, knocking me across the chest with the back of her fist, just hard enough to make me cough. “This is not the time for your dumbass jokes! Just answer the damned question— _what did Marcone do to you?_ ” 

That made me stop and look at her, _really_ look at her. Because Murphy wasn’t the type who had to go around punching guys to boost her tough-girl street cred, which meant she was seriously rattled. I could see pain and anxiety written plain on her face, tears standing in her eyes and her expression wild around the edges. 

Whatever her question was, _Marcone licked my neck_ wasn’t the answer. 

“Nothing,” I told her helplessly, feeling at a loss. “We ate dinner. We went to a movie. Then he dropped me off at home. Nothing happened.” 

“What time did he take you home?” Murphy asked sharply, and behind her eyes I could see her thoughts marshaling again, snapping back into police rhythms. 

“Stroke of midnight, or close to. I remember because when I got in, I glanced at the clock and the minute hand and the hour hand were right on top of each other—” 

“You said that he dropped you off. What was the vehicle?” 

I dropped my hands from Murphy’s arm and scrubbed them through my hair, using that as an excuse to avoid looking at her. “Horse-drawn carriage,” I muttered mutinously. “One of those stupid romantic contraptions for taking tourist couples around Navy Pier, and if you laugh at me I swear I’m slamming this door in your face. It’s not funny, I didn’t ask him to, and it’s probably going to be in the paper…” 

I trailed off. Because Murphy wasn’t laughing. She hadn’t even cracked a smile, when normally she would have taken at least a week to delight in ribbing me about it. 

“Murphy,” I asked quietly, “What’s wrong?” 

She was silent for a moment, biting her lip before answering, her tone eerily level, “Marcone was arrested last night. For murder. We found him right there on the scene with the body.” 

I felt the hair on my neck rise. “Whose?” 

She met my eyes, and gave me a long look. “Yours.” 


	4. Chapter 4

Murphy hustled me inside after that revelation and got me sat down at the kitchen table while she went outside to grab a newspaper. My brain had essentially stopped working, throwing in the towel after one surprise too many, and I sat there staring dumbly at the wood grain table trying to figure out what the hell was going on. 

I’d gone past “bewildered” sometime during that first surreal phone call on Thursday, onto “mystified” for the actual date, and now I was hovering somewhere around “flabbergasted.” At this rate they were going to have to start coining new words to describe my levels of confusion. 

“Here,” Murphy said brusquely upon her return, slapping the paper down in front of me. 

“Or you could _tell_ me, you know,” I grumbled, flipping it over to the front page. 

Her lips were tight as she took the chair opposite me. “Just read it.”

Steeling myself, I did so. 

_MAFIOSO MARCONE CAUGHT RED-HANDED IN HOTEL MURDER_ , screamed the front page headline 

I scanned past the sub-heading _—Prominent mob figure_ _found on murder scene, weapon in hand—_ to the meat of the article. _In the early hours of the morning,_ _John Marcone was arrested at the Conrad Chicago Hotel. Police, acting on a tip-off about possible gunshot noises, discovered him cleaning prints off a pistol in a luxury suite, not twenty feet from the body of murdered private investigator Harry Dresden…_

Apparently, after eating steak and watching artporn (and there had been a damnable number of witnesses to both, so much for hoping that my brief stint batting for the other team had slipped by under the radar), we had gone back to a posh five-star hotel and he’d offed me, gangland-style. A maid heard the gunshots and called the police, who then proceeded to find me (!!) lying on the bed, ventilated with extreme prejudice, and Marcone nonchalantly wiping down a gun in the adjacent bath. He submitted to arrest without a hint of resistance, and had thus far “declined to comment.” From time spent dating Susan, I knew that to mean that he had declined to comment _to the press_ , and whatever he’d said to the police was, for the moment, staying strictly under wraps. 

Which was all well and good, but mostly I dwelt on that to distract myself from how _he had murdered me_ and apparently I hadn’t noticed, and just what in blue perfect hell was going on here? 

I glanced up at Murphy, mouth open to ask a question, but it died on my lips when I saw her face. Saw the strain in her cheeks and her red-rimmed eyes and realized that until she’d seen me safe, she had been really, really upset. 

“This hit you pretty hard,” I said stupidly, quiet and almost wondering. 

From the look she gave me, I was lucky she didn’t deck me. “No shit, Harry, I thought you were _dead!_ ” she snapped heatedly. Her eyes blazed for a minute and then she forced them closed, letting out a hissing sigh and running her hand through her hair. In a more level tone she continued, “Do you have any idea how I felt, being taken to the crime scene so I could identify your body?” Her gaze flicked back to me, pinning me to my seat. “He shot you _eight times_. There was more blood on the mattress than there was left in that body. And all through processing he just stood there with that infuriating, superior smirk of his and never in all my life have I wanted to kill anyone as much as I wanted to kill him. That I had told you to go with him and see what he wanted, and he’d murdered you in cold blood, without a shred of remorse.”

“Murph, it wasn’t me,” I said gently. Granted, that meant the options of what it _really_ was ranged from innocuous to outright obscene. 

She drew in a deep breath and tipped her head back, nodding. “I know.” 

I stood and went for the icebox, politely not noticing that she had been on the verge of tears again. It was a little humbling to realize that she cared so much. I mean, I knew that I would have been devastated if anything happened to her, and would willingly have gone on the warpath after her killer, but I always had trouble believing that anyone else would do the same for me.

“Uhm… you want a coke?” I asked awkwardly, looking at the sad detritus in the icebox. Never let it be said that I cannot be a generous host. 

Murphy gave an unsteady laugh. “I think the only thing that could make that offer better would be a ‘Jack and’ but unfortunately I’m still on the clock.” She pressed her hand to her eyes, briefly, then wrapped herself in the cloak of professionalism again. “Alright, so if it wasn’t you then what is it? And just what is Marcone playing at?” 

“I don’t know—it could be any number of things. But the easiest spell that would do the job involves using a real corpse and gussying it up to look like someone else.” 

Murphy grimaced. “Charming.” 

“As for why Marcone would do that…” I trailed off and gave a broad shrug. “Your guess is as good as mine.” 

“I’d say your guess is a lot better. You’re the one who spent last night riding around in a horse-drawn carriage with the man.” A ghost of a smirk touched her lips, and I was glad enough to see her smiling that I didn’t even begrudge her amusement at my expense. 

“Yeah, you’d think, but the whole thing was bizarrely normal—if a date with a mob boss can ever be normal. Dinner, movie”—some nookie in the carriage—“then he dropped me off at home…” 

Which was when I suddenly remembered Marcone’s cryptic remark: _You would be a lot safer if your enemies didn’t know you were alive._

Christ, he’d practically spelled it out for me. I hadn’t thought much of it at the time, which I was perfectly willing to blame on him, what between the kissing and the hand on my thigh and his pathological need to play games instead of telling me flat-out, _Hey Harry, someone’s trying to kill you again!_ But in retrospect, that was kind of a blindingly obvious warning.

So this was what, his way of helping? Murdering me before the other guy could? _Stumped_ , that was another good word for describing my current state of mind. 

It wasn’t lost on Murphy that something had just occurred to me. She leaned across the table, alert like a hound on a scent. “Harry?” 

“I think he might have been trying to help me,” I said. My voice came out sounding vaguely offended at the idea, or the method anyway. “I think he faked my death to protect me from something.”

Murphy still hadn’t forgiven Marcone for my murder, so her eyes remained hard despite the flicker of amusement there. “That’s almost sweet. The same sort of idiotic, melodramatic chivalry that you would engage in.” 

“Shut up,” I muttered. 

“Man, I wish I’d been there to see your date. I bet he _totally_ treated you like the girl. I bet he held your hand and brushed your bangs from your eyes and told you that you’re pretty. Am I right?”

“I’m going to go talk to Bob now,” I warned her. Not that he would be much better. Hells bells, with the pair of them in the same room I’d never hear the end of it. “You can meet him if you like, but be prepared for a running commentary on your assets and how he thinks you should be using those assets.” 

“You make it sound so appealing, how can I refuse?” Murphy asked dryly, rolling her eyes, but she picked up her coke and rose to follow me. 

I kicked the Navajo rug aside and started down the trapdoor, Murphy two steps behind. 

“Bob!” I called loudly, banging my shin on the worktable as I cast around for candles. “Situation has officially upgraded from minor emergency to code _W-T-F_.” 

The lights flickered on in Bob’s skull. “Unless my time spent perusing raunchy chatlogs was in vain, I believe that acronym means ‘what the fuck’—an idiom used to express dismay and incomprehension.” 

He was being pedantic instead of lewd, which for Bob meant that he was annoyed with me. Murphy, meanwhile, was looking around the workshop with undisguised curiosity. 

“If you are waking me up at this time on a Saturday morning with the belated realization that Marcone did, in fact, mean _date_ in a romantic context, I shall be extremely put out.” 

“Marcone just got arrested for murdering me.” 

Two blinks from Bob. “Oh,” he said, sounding considerably taken aback. That didn’t happen often, and I wished I’d had the luxury of enjoying it for a moment. “Well, that changes things.” 

“Harry, is that a talking skull?” 

“It is indeed—Murphy, meet my sedentary sidekick, spirit of air and intellect, familiar to countless generations of wizards, and a vast repository of arcane knowledge—I call him Bob.” 

“He looks like a Halloween decoration you bought at Walmart.” 

Bob leered. “And you look like a Playboy special on law enforcement ladies, but you don’t see me jumping to conclusions.” 

“Guys, could you possibly do this later?” I growled. “I think we have more important matters to discuss.” 

“Right, of course,” Bob said agreeably. “So did you score with Marcone or what? You never came and checked in, I was thinking maybe you’d stayed out all night, bam chicka bow wow!” 

“ _Bob!_ Marcone set himself up to be found holding a smoking gun and standing twenty feet away from a body that looked enough like me to fool Murphy! He framed himself for my murder, and I need to know how and why.” 

He made the skull tip back and forth thoughtfully. “Here’s a thought—have you tried _asking Marcone_?” 

I glanced at Murphy, who read my mind and shook her head. “He’s got lawyers walling him in like linemen around a star quarterback. I wouldn’t be able to sneak you in to talk to him until later this afternoon, at the earliest.” 

“Unless I had a blending potion, in which case the two of us could do a naked tango across your superior’s desk and nobody would notice a thing.” I was already mentally cataloging the necessary ingredients for that and starting to ransack my cupboards. I wasn’t seeing any cellophane, but there was a good chance I had some upstairs, or if not then the corner store would be able to provide it.

“Murph, stay here a sec,” I said, dodging around her.

“Harry?” Bob said, sounding worried. “I hope you’re not about to do anything stupid. Because I’m on Marcone’s side here.” 

I was halfway up the ladder before that stopped me. “What?” I jumped back down. “I wasn’t aware that Marcone had a side. Other than his own, of course.” 

Bob rocked the skull to the side slightly, just enough to give the impression that he was cocking his head and maybe raising an eyebrow. “Really? Because I think the _dinner_ and _movie_ and _leaving hickeys on your neck_ suggest that he is _all over_ your side. Also that  he wants to make sweet, sweet love to you.” 

The hand that had leapt to my neck at the mention of hickeys was accompanied by a visceral reaction as I tried to shut out the imagery that accompanied Bob’s speculation. Whether or not I found such imagery appealing—and I was still pleading the fifth on that—was immaterial, because right now the odds were pretty slim that Gentleman John would be calling me up for a round two.

Murphy, noticing the gesture, smirked and tapped her own neck. “Other side,” she said indulgently. “It’s not too noticeable, but I’m a cop. Trained to pick up details and all that.” She favored me with a catty grin. “So—before, during, or after the movie?” 

“I fail to see how this is relevant to the case at hand,” I said stiffly. “But it wasn’t until he was dropping me off at my house again that he made, ah, overtures.” 

I could see the moment that her interest sharpened. “What kind of overtures?” 

“ _Murphy_ ,” I groaned through gritted teeth, desperately hoping to get out of this conversation. “You can pry about my social life later, this has nothing to do with anything.” 

“Oh, I really think it does,” Bob put in. “Inquiring minds must know!”

“Bob, _shut up_ ,” I ordered, with the weight of command behind it so he really did.

“Harry, stop playing coy,” Murphy snapped simultaneously. “What did he ask you?” 

I stopped being mortified long enough to be confused. “He didn’t ask me anything.” 

She was practically vibrating with the tension rolling off her now, and this wasn’t Murphy meddling in my love life, this was Murphy on the scent of a lead. “Okay, from the top, and don’t leave anything out because you’re afraid it’s going to compromise your masculinity—he’s taking you home, what happened?” 

“Uh… we talked in the carriage. He started to kiss me, but I stopped him.” 

Props to Murphy for being able to keep icy cool through this interrogation. “Okay, so he tried to kiss you, what else?” 

“Seriously, _nothing_ else!” I insisted, losing battle though it was. “We talked, he kissed me, I got out and went to bed—end of story. Then the next morning I wake up and someone’s trying to break down my door.” 

“Well, what did he say?”

I heaved a sigh, hooking my hand over a rung and letting it take my weight. “Some weird stuff about how I’d be better off if my enemies didn’t know I was around. Which is true, I guess, but I didn’t see how exactly I was supposed to accomplish that, so I didn’t pay much attention to it.”

A line had formed down her brow. “He didn’t ask you back to his hotel room?” 

I blinked. “No,” I said honestly. “He never said a thing about a hotel room.” Though if he had, there was even money on whether I would have agreed to it or not. 

Murphy stared at me, hard. “Are you sure?” 

It’s times like these that make you think, _I_ _ **was**_ _sure, but…_ “Yeah,” I said, which was true to the best of my knowledge. 

“Huh.” She leaned back against the ladder, forehead furrowed in thought. “Because according to the Conrad Chicago, he made that reservation at 7 PM on Thursday.” 

“Right after I called him back and agreed to go out with him.” 

“Exactly. And yeah, while I find it mildly disturbing that he thought he was going to score with you on the first date, it’s outright _weird_ that he would go through the trouble of reserving a room and then not even if ask if you wanted to go back to it.” 

“Well, if I didn’t know better, I would think he’d gotten tired of me, but something makes me doubt it’s that simple. So now it’s your turn—what do you know about this that didn’t turn up in the paper?” 

We trooped back upstairs while Murphy gave me the rundown which, as it turned out, wasn’t much. Apparently the biggest mystery (apart from how I wasn’t actually dead, obviously) was how I’d ended up in Marcone’s suite to start with. Plenty of people had seen his entrance, arriving with carriage and bodyguards as he did, but witnesses were quite certain that he hadn’t been accompanied by anyone matching my description. There were security feeds in the hallways, of course, but they hadn’t seen me going in before or after Marcone, and external cameras hadn’t noticed anyone rappelling down the side of the building.

“Marcone was in the suite by himself,” Murphy told me. “He had only one visitor, a man who arrived about half an hour after he checked in, stayed for fifteen minutes, and then left again well before the gunshots were heard. We haven’t managed to identify him yet, because each and every security camera was hit with selective static whenever he got close.” She tipped me a wry smile. “And I’ve been around you long enough to know what that probably means.” 

That got my attention. “Can you describe him?” Not that it was likely to help, since it wasn’t like wizards had a union and a photo roster, but it could be a start.

She grimaced and shook her head. “Not really. Slight, dark-haired. Maybe Latino. Clearly not you, but that’s about all we could make out—the pictures were pretty blurry. I’ve got some stills from the security footage in the car, but I wouldn’t get my hopes up if I were you.”

When it came to the nitty-gritty, forensics had already established that the bullets that had killed… me had definitely come from the gun that Marcone had been caught holding, though by the time they’d taken it off him, any prints were gone.

Which still left some pretty damning circumstantial evidence, mind you. Not to mention that Marcone had offered absolutely nothing in his defense. Not an alibi, not a self-defense plea, not even some flimsy “oops, look at this body I found!” cockamamie story that only his lawyers could ever have managed to make fly. Nor had he confessed to the killing. Or attempted to post bail. He’d said, almost literally, _nothing_.

I was silent for a moment, looking for patterns and coming up with nothing. Finally I sighed, slapping my palms down on my thighs and pushing myself to my feet. 

Murphy looked up at me, all traces of grief gone, replaced with determination. “Harry, what’s going on here?” 

“I don’t know,” I admitted frankly. “But at this point, I need to see the body, and I think the only person with answers is Marcone himself. Would you be willing to help sneak me into the morgue? And then the police station?” 

Her eyebrows were eloquent enough on their own, but all she said was, “Considering the number of _much stupider_ things I’ve done for you before, do you even need to ask? Heck, if you’ve got some spare time we go over to the morgue right now.”

“Really?” I blinked in surprise. “As in, right this instant?”

“Well, you should probably put some real pants on, but yeah.” 

That seemed like a valid suggestion. I left for the bedroom in pursuit of clothes while Murphy went back out to the car to put in a call to the station. My room was in its usual state of disarray, not helped by the clothes I had strewn about haphazardly when I was getting dressed for _the date_. Less than twelve hours ago, but already it felt like much longer thanks to all the other weirdness that was rushing in to fill the void.

I spent less time agonizing over wardrobe choices, just making sure that my collar was tall enough to hide the marks on my neck, and more time trying to put together a veil—I figured that until I got some answers, it was probably better to stay out of sight. Granted, my veils suck because I’m a slash-and-burn sort of wizard, but when you’re six-foot-six, there’s only so much that sunglasses and a baseball cap will do for a disguise. It was the better part of ten minutes before I managed to make a veil that I was confident would hold up, but it wasn’t something I could afford to cut corners on.

I locked the door behind me and went up to street level, where the construction worker and his presumed vehicle were long gone, and Murphy’s police sedan was idling at the curb. She didn’t see my approach, but jumped a foot into the air when the door opened itself. I was lucky that the cramped quarters slowed her draw as she reached for her gun, or she might have accidentally finished the job that Marcone hadn’t done.

“Whoa, Murph, it’s me!” I said hastily, dropping the veil and putting my hands up as fast as I could manage.

Half a heartbeat passed while she was still frozen with surprise, but then she exhaled sharply and her shoulders slumped as she put the gun away again.

“Jesus, Harry,” she growled, thumping an aggravated hand against the steering wheel. She was still breathing heavy from the adrenaline rush. “Don’t you dare sneak up on me like that, _especially_ not on a day like today.”

I winced. “Sorry,” I said, then offered, “At least we know my veil is working?”

“Yeah, and good thing you thought to test it.” Murphy scowled and put the car into drive; the street in front of my house all but empty at this time of morning. After a few moments of silence she drew in another steadying breath and shook her head, but her anger seemed to be ebbing. “Well, nothing like a brief surge of heart-stopping terror to give you that morning pick-me-up. Better than coffee.”

I winced again. “I said I’m sorry.”

“And I’m peeved, but mostly not at you,” Murphy said matter-of-factly. “Manila folder in the backseat, it’s got the case details as of about four o’clock this morning. I’m not in charge of this case—it belongs to homicide, not SI, and I probably wouldn’t be allowed on it anyway because of personal involvement. I’ve only got a copy because the department secretary knew you were my friend and did me a favor.”

The file was relatively thick even though it had only been compiled a few hours after the crime had taken place. There were pages of typed notes detailing the circumstances that had led to the tip-off, including a transcript of the short phone conversation between the maid and the dispatch officer when she called in the gunshots. I, being the sort of person I am, skipped all that text and went straight for the pictures.

It was uncanny how simply knowing that a picture was from a murder scene made it that much creepier, even before it showed the body. The first picture was taken from outside the room looking in, to get the general layout of the scene. All perfectly innocuous, except for the sharp, magnified intensity of the shot, eerie detail that raised the hairs on my arm before I even flipped it over.

The next one was a wide angle of the interior, with the body sprawled across the bed like a particularly gory centerpiece. From that angle, the body—I stubbornly refused to think of it as me—was impossible to identify and could have been any lanky, long-legged man. He was barefoot, wearing loose jeans and a collared shirt, only the sleeves of which were still white. Judging from the position of the corpse, I thought the man might have been sitting on the foot of the bed and then fallen backwards when someone put half a dozen bullets in him. His chest was a bloody mess of red, so fresh that the color hadn’t even started to dull yet. I set my jaw and moved on to the next photo.

This one was a torso shot and even though I’d known what to expect, it didn’t compare with the reality. I found myself utterly speechless, my former apprehension given way to stunned, open-mouthed astonishment. I was staring at _me_.

I don’t know what I’d been expecting to find. It wasn’t as though Murphy was going to be easily fooled, considering how well she knew me, but obviously she had been—see exhibit A, how I wasn’t dead and all—and I guess I’d expected the crime scene photos to bear the evidence of that. They really, really didn’t.

In the picture I lay on my back, arms sprawled limply at my sides, my head lolling back and my eyes staring sightlessly upward, lips slightly parted. In that obscene detail I could see the dead glassiness of my stare, the tiny specks on my chin where the bullets had spattered blood as they tore through my body, the slick wet sheen of blood soaking the sheets.

It was surreal. It was hard to believe that I wasn’t looking at some terribly clever photoshop job. Like if I just kept staring I’d find a fuzzed-out edge or a shadow out of place and then we could all relax knowing it all a hoax. Just a really tasteless joke, by someone who had too much free time on their hands.

Eight shots, Murphy had said. I had seen a lot of brutal stuff in my time; I’d seen people die horribly before, sometimes for reasons that were varying degrees of my fault. But it was difficult to imagine the mentality of anyone who could put a gun to another human being and then pull the trigger until it was empty. One bullet is cold-blooded; three is thorough. Eight was just pointlessly brutal overkill, even for a wizard.

Especially for a wizard.

“He wouldn’t have done it like that,” I murmured aloud, frowning at the picture.

Murphy took her eyes off the road to spare me a quick frown. “What do you mean?”

“Marcone knows about a wizard’s death curse. If he were going to kill me, you can bet he would have made sure to put the first bullet straight through the back of my head, when I wasn’t expecting it. Eight shots to the chest, at point-blank range? That’s not how you kill a wizard.”

Murphy looked unimpressed. “That’s it? The man’s murdered your doppelganger, and all you want to do is nitpick his technique?”

“I’m just saying it’s weird.”

“Oh right, because this case wasn’t weird _before_.”

There was one more photo, a tight close-up of the face. I swallowed down a shudder of revulsion and didn’t linger, instead going back to reexamine the second wide-angle picture. The face still wasn’t visible from that angle, but other details helped to confirm my identity. My hands, long and with somewhat knobby thumbs, left hand still slightly discolored from burn scars, and what looked like my feet too, although I’d never seen them from that angle before. Above the corpse’s head the bedclothes were rucked up, as if someone had been lying in bed and then climbed out without bothering to remake it.

Also, my keen investigative skills observed that it was a suite with only one disheveled, king-sized bed, and I’d been found lying casually barefoot on top of it. I didn’t even want to think about what theories the cops must be coming up with to explain how I’d landed myself in that position.

“So what do you think?” Murphy asked, breaking my reverie.

I blinked back to the present. “At this point? A whole lot of nothing conclusive. I could float a few possibilities, but I won’t know anything for certain until I see the body.”

Murphy nodded as though that was about what she’d expected. “We’ll be there soon. In the mean time, take a look at the security footage of Marcone’s visitor—maybe you can make something of it. Very back of the file. I printed off the clearest of the lot, for whatever that’s worth.”

I flipped to the end and found the other set of pictures. The first few were practically worthless, showing only the fuzzy silhouette of a slender man in black, little more than a dark blur at the end of the hallway. The cameras had taken several more from closer in, but each time selective malfunction had blurred the face as if someone had swiped a thumb across it. Even the best of the bunch was from pretty far away; it had caught the man just as he was going out the main entrance, his gloved hand pressed against the rotating glass door and his face, in profile, further obscured by dark glasses.

I stopped on that one, brow furrowing as I studied the indistinct features. There was something vaguely familiar about the figure, but I’d met a lot of people in my time, and I could have been imagining it anyway. 

“And none of the staff remembers him?” 

Murphy’s lips twitched into an apologetic smile that never touched her eyes and she shook her head. “It’s a busy hotel, they get hundreds of people coming in and out every day.” 

I sighed and put the pictures away again. “I don’t know. Maybe something will jog my memory.”

“Maybe,” Murphy concurred, but I couldn’t tell if she was agreeing out of politeness, optimism, or if she really believed it.

We drove in silence for several more minutes before she looked over at me again. “Harry?”

“Yeah?”

She gave me a tired smile. “I’m glad you’re not dead.”

As far as grand confessions go, _I’m glad you’re not dead_ ranks pretty low on the list, but I was still touched. “I—thanks, Murph. Me too.”

“Just so we’re clear,” she said, turning back to the road.

 

At the morgue I ducked under my veil again to follow Murphy inside, who got to hold doors open just a moment longer while I came in after her, without bringing attention to it. Butters, as it turned out, was on vacation, which was a minor blessing because it meant I didn’t have to let the little guy keep thinking I was dead. Covering for Butters was a slightly awkward-looking man about the same age, obviously sweet on Murphy and all too eager to give her anything she requested. He showed us right down to the corpse and then proceeded to linger hopefully until Murphy told him, politely, that he could get back to his work.

Once I was sure he was gone, I dropped the veils and went to stand by Murphy. The corpse had been wheeled out for display but it was still draped with a sheet, and I noticed that she seemed no more eager to uncover it than I was.

I took a deep breath. “Well, go on then.”

Murphy gave me a sour look. “You go on.”

“Rock, paper, scissors?”

“Oh for god’s sake.” With an irritated jerk, she picked up the corner of the sheet and tugged it back.

I was a little bit more prepared this time, but it’s always a shock to see your own dead, naked body lying on a slab. It was deader now than it had been in the photos from the crime scene, gone waxy and bluish from time and cold. Someone, presumably our friendly mortician back there, had cleaned off the blood and you could easily count the bullet wounds in the chest. They looked slightly unrealistic on that bloodless gray skin, like ragged holes that someone had poked in plastic.

But it was the face that drew me. The pictures had hinted at how uncannily accurate the likeness had been, but this was unbelievable. Every line, every hair, every fold of skin and jut of bone, it was all flawlessly true to form. This was the face that I knew better than any other. I recognized the scar on my jaw where stubble didn’t grow, the two lines starting to settle in my forehead from poring over too many books, even the half-healed scrape on my eyebrow from when I’d accidentally dropped a box on my head last week.

It was the cut that tipped me off.

This was too perfect. It wasn’t an identical twin, it wasn’t some creature mimicking me, it wasn’t the masterpiece of an extremely skillful artist. It wasn’t even something that fed me the images from my own head, taking what I expected Harry Dresden to look like and then recycling them back to me, because that scrape on my brow was too small and too new, it would be gone before long and it wasn’t incorporated into my self-image. In fact I’d forgotten it was there until I saw it on the doppelganger. This was, indistinguishably, me. The only difference between the two of us was that, thanks to a certain mobster, I was currently sporting hickeys—the body on the slab was me as I had been _yesterday._

I was reaching for the corpse before I realized that probably wasn’t such a hot idea, and stilled my hand abruptly.

“Uh, Murph? Think I can get some gloves?”

She looked around to find a dispenser, then passed me a pair and joined me over the corpse.

“What are you looking for?” she asked, peering intently as I turned the corpse’s head and began to feel along the hairline.

“A binding, of sorts. I don’t think this thing was ever alive to start with.” I caught a whiff of some kind of preservative rising from the hair as I disturbed it, and grimaced.

“What does it look like?”

“I’ll know when I see it.”

I missed it on the first pass, but found it when I began a second, more thorough inspection.

“Got it,” I said triumphantly. It was just above the hairline, at the juncture where the skull meets the spine, and almost impossible to notice. I parted the hair over it and spread it flat so that Murphy could see.

She had to lean in close, squinting hard. “I don’t see anything. What am I looking at?”

“Right there.” I put my finger on the spot. “There’s a single strand of hair that instead of growing out of the scalp like it’s supposed to, has been stitched into the skin. This thing is a golem, and whoever made it used some of my hair to bind it to my shape.”

“Huh.” Murphy straightened again but didn’t take her eyes off the spot, her lip curling with vague revulsion. “So what’s a golem?”

“Dirt that can get up and walk. Animate, but not sentient.”

She gave me a look.

“No really,” I insisted. “They’re made of mud, but a wizard can give them a zap that gets them moving. They can’t think, but they can obey simple commands, which makes them well-suited for doing mindless, physical labor. I think most golems are left pretty unfinished-looking, because they don’t last long before they run out of steam, but with a piece of hair or something you can bind them to the form of another person.”

“I see.” She glanced warily at the corpse again. “So who had the opportunity to swipe some of your hair?”

“At a guess?” I made a face. “I’d say Marcone did, for most of last night. The better question would be who made the golem for him, because that takes a wizard.”

Murphy looked up and met my eyes, brows raised expectantly, then mutely handed over the file that she’d been carrying under her arm. I flipped to the back again and stared at the pictures from the security feed, worrying at my thumbnail and silently willing it to trip some memory. Come on, there weren’t _that_ many wizards around. I did a mental roll call through everyone I could remember having seen at Council meetings, but continued to draw a blank.

I had already given a sigh of frustration and opened my mouth to tell Murphy no luck, when it dawned on me.

“Son of a bitch,” I muttered. “It’s Veda.” 

Murphy shifted. “Did you just say ‘Vader?’” 

“No, Veda. Tam Veda. Technically she’s a wizard, but she didn’t occur to me because she usually deals in rare artifacts instead of services—like a cross between an antiques dealer and a supernatural pawnbroker.” 

Murphy leaned over and squinted at the picture in my hands. “That’s a she? We’d all assumed it was a man.” 

“Er, well,” I said. “Truth is, I don’t know either.” 

“Know what?” 

“What Veda is. I don’t think anyone does. I went with ‘she’ because you can’t call a person an ‘it,’ but who knows.”

“Huh.” Murphy looked bemused and curious. 

“But either way, that doesn’t tell us what she was doing hanging out with Marcone.” 

“You think she made the golem?” 

“Well, it’s not her usual line of work, but I’m sure she’d be capable of it. Golems aren’t hard.” I shut the folder and handed it back to Murphy, picking up my staff from where I’d left it leaning against the wall. “Looks like we’re going to be paying someone a social call.” 

Murphy took the folder but glanced at her watch dubiously. “You’re going to have to do that by yourself, because I need to go back to the station. I get off early today, at noon, since I got hauled out in the middle of the night to go look at the crime scene, but it’ll probably be another couple hours before I can actually leave. You want me to come get you when I’m done, and I’ll sneak you in to see Marcone?”

“Alright,” I agreed, thinking of what I needed to prepare. Practice with my damned veils, for starters, if I wanted to leave my house without blowing my cover. Which reminded me—“By the way, what happened to that construction guy who saw me this morning? How are you going to explain that to the station when they ask how you managed to get inside my house?”

Murphy waved dismissively. “Obviously it was your brother. He used to live there, I’m sure he still has a key.”

I scoffed. “Right. Except that anyone who’s ever laid eyes on my brother isn’t likely to get the two of us confused.”

Oh _crap_ , that reminded me that I also needed to call Thomas. He was going to be getting the next-of-kin call from the police any minute now, if he hadn’t already, and I needed to let him know that I was alright. And then be an irritating baby brother and wheedle him into staying at my house for a while to handle the cops and make sure nobody started carting off my stuff as evidence. Being dead was turning out to be much more of a hassle than I’d anticipated.

I got Murphy to drop me off at home on her way back to the precinct, then dug through my closets until I found the ancient, much-abused rolodex where I’d stashed Veda’s business card some years back. I’d known her by reputation since she came to Chicago, and met her on two memorable occasions, but being a wizard myself, it wasn’t as if I’d ever needed her services. 

She was a practitioner of middling power who had moved here a while ago from either Munich or Calcutta (nobody could agree on which) and specialized in buying and selling objects of power. She’d never shown an inclination to throw her weight around, content to run her business without making trouble, so our paths hadn’t crossed much. I knew she was scrupulously neutral, good at what she did, and made a tidy sum doing it. Right, and also that no one could agree on whether she was a man or a woman, and she’d been disinclined to settle the matter. 

As I parked outside her office, the Beetle a particularly colorful eyesore amidst the rows of Benzs and BMWs, I began to revise my assessment of her profit margins from “tidy” to “generous.” It wasn’t downtown, but it was in an upscale commercial district that flaunted its tree-lined drives and wittily-named boutiques.

Veda’s office occupied the second floor of a glitzy, mirrored-glass brick of a building, over the tasteful offices of a couple’s counselor who probably charged $500 an hour. I couldn’t imagine they were pleased to have a wizard bunking on their second story, but her office met the neighborhood dress code. The sign on her tinted glass door read only “Tam Veda: Accorded”—little enough to intimidate anyone who didn’t know what she was there for, and just enough to remind the rest of us that her neutrality was to be taken seriously. 

But it was the interior that gave me a serious case of office envy. Generally, I don’t mind that my place looks a little worn—it’s casual, it’s comfortable, it’s me. My predilection for the occasional date with mob bosses notwithstanding, I don’t hit the gay stereotypes and interior decorating doesn’t hold any thrill for me. 

All too often, though, I’ll get a new client coming in, and there’s just this _moment_ where they look around my dumpy little office and I can practically hear them thinking, _If he were for real he should have been able to magic himself up some money, what the hell was I thinking, coming here?_ At which point I ask them about their problem, and they usually overcome their doubts long enough to tell me, and we take it from there, but every time that happens I get wistful thinking about what it would be like to have a real office. One that clients could look at and think, _Hey, other people are throwing wads of cash at this guy, I should too!_

So while I’m not going to wax rapturous about the color of the carpets, I was impressed and more than a little envious. It all felt immaculately professional and competent, with a nifty little zing in the air and a touch of incense to remind the visitor that this place wasn’t just any overpriced piece of real estate. 

I had entered a small reception area that sported some modern-looking leather couches and a desk for Veda’s assistant. There were a few cats lounging or strolling around the room, long-legged and graceful like slightly domesticated cheetahs. Designer cats, to go with the designer furniture. 

The receptionist matched the cats too, a haughty, poised young woman with long, slim legs that were highly visible behind the glass desk. Her name was Kim, she was Veda’s only employee and seemed to be an all-purpose aide. She had a _fantastic_ body, narrow waist and legs a mile long, and would have been drop dead gorgeous if not for a huge, disfiguring burn scar that covered nearly half her face. I’d never asked how it happened (though I could guess, since working for wizards tends to be hazardous to one’s health), but rather than trying to hide it, she kept her long hair pulled back into an austere ponytail, nearly putting it on display. 

I’d only met her once before and we’d hardly exchanged words, but I’d gotten the distinct impression that she completely loathed me, for no reason that I could fathom. From the look she was giving me now, time hadn’t changed that. 

“Mr. Dresden,” she said coolly at my approach, lacquered nails clicking against the glass tabletop as she folded her hands. Her burned eye was withered and pursed shut, but I could see the skin quiver as the muscles beneath tried to track my movements anyway. Her good eye, a vivid, piercing blue, gave me a severe look. “You don’t have an appointment. Is Veda expecting you?” 

Even compared to all the other horrors I’d seen in my life, her face was appalling and I found it extremely difficult to keep from staring. It wasn’t simply the ruined terrain of the burn, but the grotesquely hypnotic contrast it made with the beautiful woman you could still see beneath it. I had to force myself to shut out the damaged half altogether, to pretend it didn’t exist and focus my attention on the hostile blue eye currently glaring at me. 

I gave her a smile, figuring it couldn’t hurt. “Would you believe me if I said yes?” 

Her lips didn’t so much as twitch. “No.” With barely concealed reluctance, she drew her hands back across the table and stood. “Veda is with a client at the moment, but I will make your presence known. If you are granted an audience, then you may wait.” 

How generous. 

“If not, I must ask you to remove yourself from the premises.”

I shook my head. “I can’t promise that. I’ve got some serious questions for your boss.” 

With her disfigurement hidden in profile, Kim glanced back at me and raised a derisive eyebrow to let me know what she thought of my stab at authority, then ignored me entirely and slipped quietly into the adjacent room. 

It didn’t take long; she hadn’t been gone for more than a minute before she came slipping back into the lobby as discreetly as she’d slipped out. A cat joined her as she crossed the velvety carpet toward me, winding sinuously between her ankles while she walked, somehow managing not to impede either of them. Considering how many times I’d tripped over my own cat in the dark, I was willing to consider that proof-positive of black magic. 

“If you would like to wait, Veda has agreed to make time for you after the current consultation,” Kim informed me, her voice polite but a slant to her brow suggesting that she expected me to be boorish and kick up a fuss at being deferred. 

Feeling contrary, I gave her a sunny smile. “Lead the way.” 

She showed me into a small waiting room off the main lobby and left me there, with a dire look that seemed to evince skepticism over whether I was housebroken. The cat opted to stay, detaching itself from Kim and reattaching itself to me as she slipped quietly back to her post. 

For lack of other entertainment, I sat down on the couch, which smelled nice but wasn’t particularly comfortable. The cat came over and jumped up on the couch next to me, cocking its head expectantly for pets, every inch of its cool, furry demeanor suggesting that this was a service rendered for guests, like complimentary mints and hot towels. There’s no real reason for wizards to have cats, unless you’re maybe the kind of wizard who likes to keep live sacrifices on hand, so it was coincidence that I had a cat too. 

“I wonder what you’d think of Mister,” I mused aloud to the feline, who was waiting on me with a perfunctory display of attentiveness. “Or maybe you don’t even give other cats the time of day unless they’ve got a pedigree as long as my medical history.” 

I hadn’t moved to pet it and so the cat, evidently deciding I was somewhat slow but determined to do its job anyway, butted my hand with its head and immediately set about purring loudly and insincerely. I gave in and scritched its silky ears while I waited for Veda. 

And waited. 

And waited. 

It probably wasn’t that long, but as anybody who’s sat around in a waiting room without even a back issue of _Better Homes and Gardens_ knows, it felt a hell of a lot longer. The cat dutifully kept me company, responding to my half-hearted pets with a faked enthusiasm better suited to high class call girls. Oh sorry, I mean _escorts_ —and it’s a long story how I got to know any such ladies of the night, but I must say that the scenery (if nothing else) was better than usual on that case. 

Finally I heard the telltale click of the doorknob and the cat immediately bounded away, relieved of its duty. It slithered between Veda’s ankles as she came through the door and shot back out into the lobby before she could close it behind her.

She looked much the same as the last time I’d seen her—slim and androgynously devoid of either musculature or curves that might lend a hint. She had short, curling black hair and an Indian (or perhaps Middle Eastern) cast to her dark features, eyes partially concealed behind blue-tinted glasses. Her white suit was as immaculate as her office, and considerably cleaner than it had been when I’d seen her last. In her defense, she’d been fending off critters made of burning ectoplasm at the time.

“So. Harry Dresden. I had a feeling I might be seeing you.” Veda shut the door behind her and crossed the room in measured steps to take a seat on the couch opposite me. 

I was staring at her again, trying to remember why I’d thought she was a she. Though reasonably attractive, her face was much more masculine than I remembered. She had generous lips and darkly-lashed eyes just barely visible behind the glasses, but those features were offset by an angular jaw and heavy brows. As I recalled, I’d ended up staring impolitely last time too—gender is one of those basic, fundamental things that you just expect to _know_ about a person. It threw me off my game when no amount of scrutiny was producing an answer.

Then I realized she probably cultivated the look on purpose, knowing full well the effect it had on people, and resolved not to care. I sat back in my chair and crossed my arms.

“Hello Veda, nice to see you again,” I said flatly. “You want to tell me what you’ve been doing with Marcone lately?”

Veda settled an arm over the back of the couch and crossed her legs primly, the light glinting off her glossy black shoes. Her slight, cocky smile wouldn’t have looked out of place on Marcone. They probably got along like a house on fire.

“Mr. Dresden, I abide by a strict policy of client confidentiality,” she informed me, maintaining her smile even though a note of warning dipped into her voice. “As a fellow professional, I would expect you of all people to understand.”

“Look, there’s no point in playing coy. I saw the golem you made—nice work, by the way, it was very convincing—and I know you made it so Marcone could frame himself for my death. I just want to know why.”

“Correction,” Veda put in. “You know I made a golem for Mr. Marcone. Even I didn’t know what it was for until I read the paper this morning.” 

She tilted her head, lifting an eyebrow as though waiting for me to call her a liar. I obliged. 

“Riiight,” I drawled. “So Marcone comes to you and says, ‘Gimme a golem that looks exactly like Harry Dresden,’ and you had _no idea_ why? I find that hard to believe.” 

“Mr. Marcone plays it close to the chest. I had my suspicions, certainly,” she acknowledged with a careless shrug. “Though they turned out to be wrong.” 

“Indulge me. What did you think it was for?”

She scowled, a look that I recognized all too well from Marcone, the annoyance of dirty people who don’t want to discuss their dirty work. “The same thing that anyone wants a golem for,” she replied at length. 

I was stumped. Unskilled labor? What else could they even do? Evidently my “Wizardry for Fun and Profit” class had missed the chapter on how to make a buck selling golems. 

Veda must have seen the look of blank incomprehension on my face, for she heaved a sigh and rolled her eyes heavenward. “ _Think_ , Mr. Dresden. Physically indistinguishable from the human of their choice and utterly compliant—what do you imagine most people want with a golem?” 

Oh. _Ohh._ “Oh, yuck,” I said with feeling. “That is _disgusting_.” 

Morally in the clear, since golems have all the sentience of bricks, but still the world’s creepiest version of a blow-up doll. 

Veda’s smirk was back, apparently amused by my discomfiture. “I don’t judge,” she said complacently. “What becomes of my creations after they leave my hands is entirely up to the discretion of my clients, and neither my responsibility nor my concern.”

“And you thought Marcone wanted a mock-up of me for _that?_ ” I demanded, appalled on both my behalf and his. 

Veda shrugged, unconcerned. “His interest in you is no secret.” 

Hells bells, first Bob and now Veda. And I hardly even _knew_ Veda. 

“Yuck,” I muttered again, wishing I could scrub that mental image from my brain. I wiped my palms against my trousers, ignoring Veda’s overt amusement. “But then why kill it?” I wondered aloud, not really expecting an answer. 

“For that, I suspect you would need to ask Mr. Marcone directly, because I don’t know and I wouldn’t tell you even if I did. Offhand though, I would guess that he is doing you a curious sort of favor.” 

I glanced up and met her eyes, biting my cheek apprehensively. It had just occurred to me that if I really were better off staying ‘dead’ for a while, then Veda here knew the truth and could blow the whole thing open if she chose to. 

Lucky me, she happened to be for sale. 

“How much do I need to bribe you to keep this a secret?” I asked reluctantly. In my experience, supernatural freelancers tended to scalp you. 

Veda gave me a receptionist’s smile. “You’re paid up already. My ‘ensuing silence on matters related to possible consequences of this transaction’ was a stipulation in my agreement with Marcone.” 

Huh. 

 

After my uninformative visit with Veda, I went home and got Bob to help me cook up an express-lane version of the blending potion. I was going to need it when Murphy smuggled me into the police station that afternoon. 

I wasn’t quite sure whether using it in the presence of someone who _knew_ what I was would augment or erode its effects, but I was running short on options. I needed to get down to the police station and talk to Marcone, and it would help to have Murphy there to take care of any obstacles the potion couldn’t handle. 

She picked me up at three and we drove to the police station in near-silence, Murphy gripping the wheel as though sheer willpower could keep the state-owned sedan from breaking down in my presence, and me sitting in the passenger seat and clutching the Gatorade bottle of blending potion like a talisman. 

I almost jumped out of my skin when the depths of Murphy’s bag suddenly started regaling us with “People Are Strange.”

Sparing her eyes from the road for a moment, Murphy dug out her cellphone and flipped it open, checking the display before wedging it under her shoulder so she could put both hands back on the wheel. 

“Murphy,” she said curtly, no need to stand on ceremony with whoever was calling. “Uh-huh. Yeah, what’s going on?” 

Immediately her brows clamped down into an expression that I could only describe as _not boding well_. “What kind of disturbance?” she demanded sharply. Then, “ _Fuck_. Well, I’m already on my way, I’ll be there in ten.” 

She slapped the phone shut and threw it back into her purse without looking, immediately gunning the engine. “Something’s attacking the holding cells,” she told me, voice tight. “Preternaturally strong, tearing down the walls, causing electrical disturbances, the works. Sound like one of your guys?” 

“You’d better make it five,” I advised grimly. 


	5. Chapter 5

The police station was smoking when we got there, with no visible damage from the angle we approached, but I could see a trickle of black that trailed off into the sky like a watered, inky stain. Murphy had no sooner thrown the car into park before she was out and pounding hell-for-leather toward the station. I gulped down the blending potion and then ran to catch up with her, even though it was disorienting trying to run while the potion took effect. 

Inside was chaos, but I could sense immediately that this was the aftermath—we were too late. Whatever had happened, it was over now, and all that remained was people scrambling to pick up the pieces. Murphy, as the only one who was truly aware of me, stood out in vivid technicolor, but not so much as a flicker of recognition colored anyone else’s face as their eyes slid over me, caught up in their own crises as they were. 

“Casey, what the hell happened here?” Murphy asked, snagging a cop as he hurried by. 

His relief at seeing her was palpable. “Sergeant, thank god. We got no goddamn idea—one moment everything was normal, and then the next, someone had blown a hole in the southeast wall and we’d lost radio contact with the guard station. By the time we got anyone down there, the place was already in shambles.” 

“What about the prisoners?” 

Casey faltered. “Most of them were untouched. Marcone…” 

The pit of my stomach went cold, because with that single word he’d conveyed a wealth of apprehension. 

“What about Marcone?” Murphy asked for me. 

“He’s… gone,” Casey answered carefully. “You’d better see for yourself.” 

“Show me.” 

Apparently following in Murphy’s wake rendered me even more thoroughly invisible than when I’d come here on my own. It never occurred to anyone to challenge my presence or even notice me, not with Murphy there to draw the attention away; their eyes never went higher than my shoulders, settling on clothes and simply assuming that the person inside them belonged there. 

We were led down an all-too-familiar set of stairs into the basement holding cells. I almost expected to get caught out at the guard station—what with that whole ‘fool me twice, shame on me’ thing—but magic trumps folk wisdom and we were through. I could feel currents of power floating in the air before we even set foot in the hallway; it wasn’t the choking, resinous sludge of black magic, but it had the prickle of a spell still active and I entered with caution. 

From here, the area looked almost perfectly normal—except for the prone bodies of a handful of guards, one slumped at the station and two more on the floor nearby. At first I assumed they were dead, then saw that the cop with first aid kit looked worried but not stricken, and realized that the prickle I’d felt in the air was a spell for holding them asleep. Firm, but not malignant—they would wake in a few hours no worse for the wear. I just hoped the same could be said for Marcone. 

Casey, the man who’d led us down here, was now giving a rapid-fire explanation of what had happened, starting from when they first noticed something was wrong. I ignored him and stepped past the prone guards, making unerringly for the cell that had been Marcone’s. The strongest traces of magic residue were emanating from it, but it didn’t take magic to confirm that this had been the spot. 

By design or by virtue of having been built on a swamp, the floor with the holding cells was about three-quarters below ground level, and something had knocked a hole the size of a door through an upper portion of the wall, leading straight outside. The cell was still strewn with rubble and I could feel magic stagnating in the air like lingering gunsmoke, but far more worrisome was the massive pool of blood in the center of the cell, seeping with sickly inevitability down the slanted floor toward the corridor. 

Marcone was ‘gone’ in the sense that several liters of him were left behind. 

“—they said that they heard a thud, and then Marcone shouted something, though no one’s sure just what he said, which was when the lights went out,” Casey was saying. “And from that point on, no one can agree on what happened. Everyone seems to have heard something different.” 

Standard obfuscation spell, it sounded like. I tuned him out again and, after a quick glance to make sure that no one from the other end of the hall was paying attention to me, rested my hand over the lock to the cell and sent a brief kinetic shock through it, knocking the pins into alignment. The door swung open soundlessly and I took a few careful steps inside. 

_I was too late,_ I thought numbly, staring at the mess of blood on the floor. From this distance I could smell it, metallic and cloying, the puddle still brilliantly red. 

Was it even possible to survive that much blood loss? Or had I wasted time with my pointless interrogation of Veda and let Marcone get murdered while he sat helpless in this cell? 

Taking a few more cautious steps forward, I dug around in my pockets until I found something to scoop up a sample of the blood. I hadn’t packed with this in mind when I left the house—and the cops would no doubt kick up an unholy ruckus if they noticed what I was doing to their crime scene—but I managed to produce a ballpoint pen and scrape a fair sized sample of blood into the cap. The trick was not thinking about where it had come from. 

I wrapped it in a crumpled tissue and shoved it into my pocket, discreetly slipping back into the hallway. While I’d been investigating the cell, the detective from homicide had finally dragged his butt to the scene and now he and Murphy were about two seconds away from someone throwing a punch.

“—am _not_ ‘impeding your investigation’ and you damned well know it!” Murphy practically sputtered. “The case with Marcone was homicide’s, yeah, but now he’s been kidnapped and this M.O.? Has Special Investigations written all over it!” 

I edged into Murphy’s peripheral vision, discreetly trying to catch her attention without accidentally getting anyone else’s. I had enough of Marcone in my pocket to run a tracking spell, no problem, but it looked like time was of the essence, and I really couldn’t afford to wait out an interdepartmental turf war. 

“We appreciate your… _dedication_ to your job,” a man with an irritating, nasal voice replied, sounding condescendingly insincere. “But unless you feel like you haven’t been demoted enough already, _Sergeant_ Murphy, then I suggest you keep your ass in SI and your nose out of our case.”

Damn it, the potion was starting to work on Murphy too, and I could see the colors bleeding out of her as the argument with homicide took her attention and I began to fade from her awareness. I didn’t have time for this; I had to get out of here and track down Marcone as soon as possible, and I couldn’t risk trying to get Murphy’s attention. Only thing to do was to hope she noticed my absence and came after me. 

I edged up the stairs behind Murphy, relieved when no one so much as glanced at me, their attention wholly absorbed by the argument, and then broke into a run as soon as I was out of sight. There were enough other people running around on the main level that I didn’t stand out and within minutes I was back in the parking lot, digging my duffel bag out of Murphy’s trunk. 

Murphy was going to be so pissed if I took off after Marcone in her car, but I was running short on options. On the rough black asphalt I mapped out a quick circle of chalk, nearly fumbling in my haste as I sketched in the necessary runes. Then I withdrew the pen cap from my coat again and forced myself to slow down, smearing some of it on my wrist (wizarding, not always so hygienic) and some in the circle.

“Okay, you crazy son of a bitch,” I muttered. “You better not have gone far. _Quaero_.” 

It was like snapping my fingers, or striking flint to a rock, but instead of catching the way it ought to, the spark simply flared and died out just as quickly. 

That wasn’t how it was supposed to go. 

“ _Quaero!_ ” I repeated urgently. 

A flare, a fizz, then nothing. 

Shit, shit, _shit._ “ _Quaero_ ,” I tried one more time, more out of disbelief and desperation than because I expected the spell to work. 

Because I knew what it meant when the tracking spell failed to take. It meant that there was nothing for it to follow, and if I’d wanted to be stupidly optimistic I could have pretended to hold out hope that Marcone was in the Nevernever, but good as I was at lying to myself, there were limits. I was no judge of volume, but that had looked like _gallons_ of blood on the floor, and now the tracking spell was coming up empty. I may not have graduated high school, but I could add two and two and get four.

“Damn it, Marcone,” I whispered, hands dropping in defeat.

I was still staring at the circle, but I wasn’t really seeing it now. My mind was reeling, cycling back through all the other crazy shit that Marcone had managed to survive, only to die here, caught up in god-only-knew what. 

What had he died trying to protect me from? And what was I going to do now that my only lead had gone and gotten himself killed? Also, I’d never managed to find out whether he’d _meant it_ when he tried to kiss me or whether he was just messing with my head. Thanks a lot, Marcone. 

But the kicker was, I felt responsible. Despite knowing full well that Bob, Murphy, Thomas, and pretty much everyone else in my life would tell me that I was being a dumbass, that if _anybody_ was a big kid who could take care of himself it was Marcone, I couldn’t help the little wrench of guilt that a plain-vanilla human had been screwed over by something from my side of the fence and I hadn’t been able to do a damn thing about it. It brought back the taste of too many other failures, near-misses, and self-imposed guilt trips when someone died that I felt I should have been able to save. I’d taken it for granted than Marcone would never be among them, that he would be a constant in my life. A constant _thorn_ in my side, yeah, but still a constant—until I found myself staring at a streak of rapidly-drying blood and a worthless tracking spell. 

_I should have at least told you that I wanted to kiss you too_ , I thought numbly. 

He’d probably known, of course. I mean, this was Marcone we were talking about and even on a good day my poker face was charitably described as “transparent.” Still, I should have explained my refusal better. I should have kept him parked in front of my house and talking until he couldn’t go back to his fancy hotel and murder a not-me and set this whole stupid chain of events in motion. 

And now that he was dead, now that it was all too late to change, I found it easier to admit that I’d thought of him as a friend. The weird, slightly unnerving sort of friend that you don’t want to acknowledge you even know and definitely can’t introduce to your parents, but who you trust with your life, knowing he’ll always have your back. 

Actually I wasn’t sure that described any other friendship on the planet, but it about summed up me and Marcone. Dysfunctional, to be sure, but what else was new in my life? I’d thought that he would always be there—as much as I’d thought about him at all, mind you—and it was hitting me hard, much harder than I would have expected, to suddenly realize that he wouldn’t.

I was only vaguely aware of what was going on around me, cars pulling in and out of the parking lot and ignoring me as firmly as I was ignoring them. I might have sat there indefinitely, until a glossy Cadillac screeched into the spot next to me and slammed to a halt, horn blaring to get my attention. 

I looked up to see a power window scrolling smoothly down, revealing a gorgeous profile framed by sleek brown hair. I didn’t even recognize the woman as Veda’s assistant until she turned to look me straight on and I was jarred again by the sight of her scars. 

“Get in,” Kim said curtly, apparently unimpressed by my anguish.

I climbed to my feet, squinting and peering past her to the driver’s seat where Veda was unconcernedly putting the car in park. 

“What the heck are you doing here?” I demanded, feeling a bit like Alice down the rabbit hole. 

Kim was too dignified to roll her eyes, but her aggrieved sigh more than made up for it. “Just get in the car, it’ll be explained on the way.” 

On the way to _where_ , was the question, but I was just about resigned to the fact that I wasn’t going to be getting answers any time soon. I sighed, grabbing the door to the backseat and wrenching it open with more force than necessary. 

I’d climbed inside and slumped into the chair before I realized that the backseat wasn’t empty. 

“Hi, Harry,” John Marcone said, with his trademarked smirk.

Time to start coining new words. How about _flusterfucked?_

 

Such was my shock that it didn’t even occur to me to tell him that he wasn’t allowed to call me Harry. 

I stared. I gaped. I boggled. I wondered if I was allowed to call a do-over on all the maudlin thoughts I’d had for him while I’d thought he was dead. Then I gave up and put my face in my hands, massaging my temples, because if this day hadn’t earned me a well-deserved mental breakdown by now, then I didn’t know what would. 

“Okay,” I said, striving for calm and rational rather than _about to throttle him_. “Just what in the  ten hells is going on?” 

“Well, Mr. Veda and his assistant here have just fulfilled the terms of their contract by successfully retrieving me from the holding cells of Chicago’s finest, and are now driving the two of us to an undisclosed location.” 

I looked up at Veda in the front seat. “So you’d been planning this jailbreak all along, but you couldn’t have happened to mention that when I came by earlier?” 

We were of course back in motion by now, though I had no idea where we were headed.

Veda’s eyes, hooded behind her blue glasses, flicked to meet mine in the rearview mirror. “Breach of contract,” she replied, unruffled. “If you want to get angry with someone, get angry with Marcone—he never said to tell you.”

I looked at Marcone. He shrugged, unrepentant. “I hadn’t expected you to track down Mr. Veda before he got me out. Clearly I underestimated you.” 

Which told me precisely nothing. 

“Marcone,” I said. “What are you _doing_?” I was hoping that—for just once in his life—he might actually answer me instead of talking in riddles and making me chase my own tail. 

“Protecting the both of us, I hope,” he replied implacably, turning to meet my eyes and matching my steely gaze. 

It occurred to me suddenly that this might be what women were talking about when they complained about my misguided chauvinism and my desire to take all the world’s burdens on my shoulders to spare them from it. Because right now John Marcone was trying to shield me from something, without telling me what it was, and it was _driving me crazy._

“From _what_?” I demanded, more frustrated that I would have liked to let on. 

He gave a tight smile and spread his hands. “Ask, and I shall endeavor to answer.” 

And he accused me of playing twenty questions. I stole a quick glance at the front seat, but Veda and Kim, in the manner of immaculately professional limo drivers everywhere, were feigning deafness to the antics in the backseat. 

“Fine. Vampires,” I guessed flatly. 

“No.” 

“Demons.” 

There was a pause, but he said again, “No.” 

“Werewolves.” 

“No.” 

“Were… something else?” 

“No.” 

Okay, well those were the most likely things that he might have thought going to jail could protect him from. I decided to try broader brushstrokes. 

“Anything non-human?” 

“No.” 

Well, that narrowed the playing field by a lot, actually. 

“Is it your buddies in the mob?”

“No.”

“Is it another wizard?” 

Dead silence from Marcone, but his eyes were locked on me with such intensity that it nearly felt like a second soulgaze. I was unsettled enough already, and his eerie stare wasn’t helping.

“Damn it, Marcone, just answer the question!” I burst out. “Is it another wizard or not?” 

Again, I was met with complete silence, but this time he placed a hand flat on the empty seat between us and leaned forward until his seatbelt creaked and caught, close enough that I could smell his cologne. Then I noticed that his knuckles were clenched white over the upholstery, and the answer came to me all in a flash. 

“You can’t answer that,” I guessed with sudden certainty. “Because it _is_ another wizard. And they’ve put a silencing spell on you.” 

He didn’t move. Not so much as a blink, and that was all the answer I needed. 

“Goddamn it all,” I exhaled.

“ _What?_ ” Veda barked. The car made a sudden lurch, swerving as she slammed on the brakes and then took us barreling gracelessly onto the side of the road. When it was stopped she craned around in her seat to look at us, dark brows drawn taut behind her glasses. “Marcone has a _silencing spell_ on him?” 

I ignored her to process the ramifications of this. Obviously it was a localized spell and not a full silence, because Marcone had already proven that he could say plenty, just not what he wanted to. Which was actually much worse, because a localized silence is a lot harder to spot. Basically, it meant that he knew _something_ a wizard didn’t want him telling anyone, and they’d bound him so that he couldn’t speak a word of it. 

Marcone let out an aggrieved sigh and sank back into his seat, giving me a look like, _And you couldn’t have figured this out_ _ **before**_ _I got myself sent to jail?_

“A silencing spell?” Kim echoed, likewise twisting in her chair to eye us backseat miscreants suspiciously. “I don’t suppose he can get around that by writing it down?” 

I snorted. “When’s the last time anything went that easy for me?” I asked, mostly rhetorically. “A good silencing spell cracks down on nonverbal communication as well, so you can rule charades and pictionary right out.” 

Allow me a brief aside on the topic of silencing spells: they’re nowhere near as innocuous as the name makes them sound. To say that they’re against the Laws of Magic is like saying that the police generally frown on homicide. Your average Joe off the street wouldn’t get why they’re so bad, since they don’t involve torturing kittens or sacrificing babies, but they’re _dark_ magic. Words hold unbelievable power. Speech is what separates us from the animals. There’s a reason why the traditional method of disarming a wizard permanently is cutting his tongue out. Silencing someone, cutting them off from _their own_ _words_ is a violation on par with rape. 

Granted, bad guys who don’t play by the rules are nothing new to me—hell, been there, done that, got the scars and the t-shirt to prove it—so my mind was already fast-forwarding past the horrified outrage and taking a prognosis on this new development. And as the Magic 8-Ball would say: Outlook not so good. 

Because this spell was _damned_ subtle, and that bespoke a degree of precision and control that I prefer not to encounter in renegade dark wizards. I’d spent five hours in Marcone’s company last night (not that I’d been counting or anything) without clueing in to what was going on, and I like to think I’m a pretty smart cookie. I mean sure, I’d had a hunch there was something weird about the whole thing, but I eat weird for breakfast and when a mafia boss calls you up out of the blue and invites you to explore alternate sexualities, _Oh hey, it must be a silencing spell!_ isn’t the first thing that leaps to mind.

A poorly-done silencing spell can have all kinds of glitches—for instance, when the victim tries to mention the forbidden topic their mouths will open but nothing will come out, or their voice will trip around like a broken record. Or if it’s too heavy-handed they won’t be able to speak at all. Those are pretty obvious though, and it wouldn’t have taken me long to realize that something was wrong with Marcone. This one was deft enough that he was able to talk about almost anything else, but at the same time it kept him from giving the game away with nonverbal signals. 

Still, as Ovid’s _Metamorphoses_ can tell you, silencing someone is only as effective as they allow it to be. Anyone with enough determination can keep hurling themselves up against the spell’s limitations until they find something that the caster overlooked, like a loophole that they can drop hints through, or screw with the spell until it malfunctions and someone recognizes it for what it is. I had no doubt that Marcone had been doing exactly that for the entire duration of our date, and it was chilling to realize that there had been _no sign_ of it. 

“Marcone, lean toward me again and tip your head up,” I instructed. 

He did as I asked, placing his hand flat on the seat again and tilting his face to the roof of the car with the air of a man resigning himself to invasive dental surgery. After a moment’s hesitation I brought my hands up to rest on either side of his neck. I still didn’t feel anything amiss. 

Which meant I had to check it with my Sight, and although I wasn’t sure I wanted to know what it would show me about Marcone, I didn’t have much of a choice. _You’ve soulgazed with the man,_ I told myself. _How much worse could wizard’s Sight be…?_ I shut my eyes briefly, opened my senses to magic, and then let it all pour in. 

Marcone was a tiger. I found myself only a little surprised at my _lack_ of surprise, because it was only what I’d known all along, but I was obscurely reassured to learn that he was a tiger on the dark side of the looking glass too, so to speak. Nor was that the worst thing I could have seen—he was a beast in the sense that he was a predator, but in the most natural, primal meaning of the word. Nature doesn’t know evil; Marcone held no trace of the corruption and the sickening miasma that I had smelled on true evil before. He was simply a tiger—strong and without mercy, but driven by necessity rather than sadism.

He was also a tiger in a collar. I could see the spell now, a band around his throat that the beast rebelled against even as he held himself quiescent under my hands. 

I had seen enough. I blinked off the Sight and saw him again as a man, jaw set and silent as he endured my scrutiny. 

I took my hands away, somewhat stumped for a response. “Well. That can’t be comfortable,” I remarked at last. 

Marcone huffed a curt laugh and rolled his eyes skyward. “When people ask me what I see in you, Mr. Dresden, I am going to make up lies about your sexual prowess, because _clearly_ it is not for your keen skills of observation.” 

I’d all but forgotten that he could still talk, provided he wasn’t trying to talk about certain tongue-tying wizards. Which was too bad, because I rather liked the idea of a silent, damsel-in-distress Marcone. I know how to deal with damsels—I’m not as good with mob bosses who are snarky and under-impressed by my help. 

“I’ll say,” Veda put in from the front seat. She gave a couple blinks in rapid succession and drew her head back, and I realized that she’d been using her Sight too. There was a faint tremor in her voice, and I wondered what she’d seen when she looked at me. Without another word, she grabbed the gearstick again and sent us hurtling back out into traffic.

“Well—in any case,” I said. “I suppose now that I know about it, you want me to take it off.”

Marcone raised his eyebrows as though I’d said something so stupid he was pointedly having trouble even finding a proper response to it. After a moment I realized that he was doing nothing of the sort; to most people, silence is its own form of communication, and I was attributing meaning to it where there was none. He was simply cycling through possible answers until he found one that the spell would let him get away with. Very limiting, considering that he wasn’t even allowed to acknowledge the spell’s existence.

At last he settled on, “I _have_ gone through a lot of trouble to get your attention.” 

Tangential, but if I hadn’t known about the spell I would have assumed an answer like that was just Marcone being his usual, sideways self. This was subtle work, and I wasn’t liking it one bit. The sooner I got it off, the better, especially since as long as the spell was on him, the wizard who cast it would know that he was still alive.

Which reminded me—“What about all that blood in the cell?” 

“Pig’s blood,” Kim provided from the front seat. “So that if anyone tried to follow it, they’d think Marcone was dead.” 

Like me. Well, that answered one question. 

I sighed and turned to Marcone. “Okay, so, uh… basically how this works is that I have to absorb the magic that’s powering the spell.” 

A pause, then he said, “You’re the expert here, Mr. Dresden,” which I interpreted to mean, _Stop explaining and do it already._

“Yeah, so, ah… the way to do that. It’s kind of…” 

“He needs to kiss you,” Veda put in matter-of-factly from the driver’s seat. 

Marcone’s gaze remained steady on me, but his eyebrows hit his hairline. 

“Or Veda could do it,” I volunteered hastily. 

“Not while I’m driving.” 

Marcone’s face still had surprise written all over it, but equal parts amused and speculative were beginning to creep in at the edges. Oh, it was a good thing Murphy wasn’t here. Or Bob. I’d never live this down.

I looked Marcone in the eye. Took a breath. I could do this. It wasn’t going to interfere with my anti-vamp protection, because kisses to break spells count as the magical equivalent of CPR. No harm, no foul.

Marcone was now smirking like the cat who ate the canary, entirely too pleased for someone with a silencing spell around his neck. Breathe, Harry. Magical CPR. 

“So, uh… you don’t have to kiss back,” I offered, though it came out sounding kind of desperate. 

His smile broadened. “I don’t _have_ to do anything. But will it interfere if I do?”

“Yes,” I replied, just as Veda said, “No.” 

I glared at her. “ _Thanks._ ” 

In the mirror I could see her watching me, one brow rising behind her glasses. “Sorry, I’m not in the habit of lying to clients.”

Whereas I was in the habit of being the only wizard around. Usually I get to tell people whatever I like about magic and there’s no one to contradict me. 

I heaved a sigh. “Fine, let’s get this over with.” 

Marcone gave me a cheeky smile. “Only because you’re such a sweet talker.” 

I ignored the jibe, instead took a deep breath and reluctantly settled my hands on his face, thumbs pressed against the line of his jaw so that my other fingers rested on the spell where it encircled his neck. 

I was trying to be detached and professional about it, but I was intensely aware of just who I was laying hands on in such an intimate way, and of his gaze on me. It would have been easier if he’d looked sideways or off into the distance or something, but instead he was looking right at me, perhaps more open than I’d ever seen him. He was slightly tense, sure, but what left me stunned—and humbled—was the trust in his eyes. John Marcone, criminal mastermind, who certainly hadn’t gotten where he was by being generous with his confidences, was placing his unconditional faith in _me,_ trusting me with his body and soul and sanity. 

I don’t know what he interpreted my hesitation as, but he gave me a small, reassuring smile and an almost imperceptible nod. Impulsively, as if this were an actual kiss and not magical CPR, I leaned in to close the gap between us. 

Now it wasn’t as if I’d spent much time thinking about what it would be like to kiss Marcone—what, me? God forbid—though _if_ I had, I would have expected it to be a lot more… forceful. Not inexplicably careful like this, which was not at all like what you’d expect from a kiss between two grown men, neither of whom were lacking in experience. 

But instead I felt like I was fourteen again and kissing Elaine for the first time, that heady feeling of jumping in at the deep end when you’re not even sure if you can swim in the shallows yet, where you’re nervous and excited and terrified and invincible and frankly it’s a wonder that the human race has managed to survive as long as it has, considering the unbelievable amount of stress and confusion that goes into sex. I could feel my own breath quickening, and considering that I was breathing into Marcone’s mouth, it was a safe bet to say that he could feel it too. 

Especially since he made an unbelievably sexy, not-quite-vocal groan and put a hand up to pull my head closer to his. Which—probably antithetical to his purposes—reminded me what I was doing locking lips with organized criminals to begin with. 

Right. Removing inconvenient and hella-illegal silencing spells. 

I concentrated until I could feel the thin band of energy pulsing at his throat, and then opened my lips in anticipation of swallowing the magic that powered it. Removing the spell required an open-mouthed kiss; it did not require tongue, but apparently Marcone wanted to be on the safe side. When Veda had said that kissing back wouldn’t hinder the spell’s removal, she was assuming that being kissed wouldn’t hinder my ability to do my damned job.

_Unsexy thoughts, Harry, think_ _**un** _ _sexy thoughts. Senior Council at a nude beach—whoa—_

It worked just long enough for me to suck up the ball of magic on Marcone, a little too fast so it wasn’t a smooth swallow, but instead got caught at the top of my throat and I have to stop and force it down like bad medicine. Not entirely a bad analogy, but I wasn’t much bothered by it because I was done now. 

I disengaged from Marcone and drew back, not even aware that the expression on my face had been a smile until I met his stony, furthest-thing-from-a-smile eyes, and it died. 

“Marcone?” I asked, wary and more than a little concerned.

“ _Harry,_ ” he gritted out, and if he had been about to throw me down and have his way with me on the backseat of Veda’s Cadillac a few minutes ago, he wasn’t anymore. Now he looked not at all amused and not at all amorous.

“Don’t call me…” I began automatically, then stopped when I realized that his knuckles were white where they gripped the front of my coat. 

The silencing spell wasn’t gone. 

 

It took two more attempts, during which Marcone grew mutely but increasingly more infuriated, and thus not nearly as distracting, and three more confirmations with my Sight before I was forced to conclude that I was incapable of lifting the spell.

It’s not that it was complicated, but instead of furnishing the spell with a small chunk of power, enough to keep it going for a decade or so, the wizard who cast it had left it hooked up to _their own_ power. Which meant that every time I tried to absorb the magic fueling it, more came rushing in to fill the void. Theoretically I could have kept at it until the wizard himself (or herself) was depleted, but that was more or less akin to trying to suck up Lake Michigan with a straw.

“Jesus _wept_ ,” I muttered.

“What’s going on?” Veda demanded, with the belligerence of someone who hadn’t been able to score a decent seat for the action. 

I explained the situation, as succinctly and with as few swear words as I could manage. 

I don’t know what language Veda cursed in, but whatever she said, it couldn’t have been pretty. She spat another few hoarse, guttural consonants just for good measure and gave the steering wheel another impotent smack before wheeling us violently off the road and into a parking lot. We screeched into a parking space and slammed to a halt; I couldn’t see Veda’s face, but I thought she was doing an impressive job of using the car as an extension of her body language. 

“—preference on which ID to use?” Kim was asking as she dug around for something in the glovebox, and I realized that we hadn’t stopped just so that Veda could indulge in theatrics. 

“Any of them are fine. There’s nobody I’m trying to keep a low profile on,” Veda replied. “Here, hold still.” 

Kim obediently bowed her head and froze, still as a statue while Veda produced a necklace from somewhere and looped the stiff leather thong over Kim’s neck. And suddenly the beautiful and obscenely-scarred woman in the front seat was gone, replaced by the most unremarkable person I had ever laid eyes on. Seriously, she was a woman that you could chat with for half an hour, look away from once, and a minute later you couldn’t even remember what color her hair had been. I couldn’t tell whether it was magic or whether there are just some features so boring that the brain can’t be bothered to take note of them.

Kim opened the door and climbed halfway out— _unremarkable body too, not ugly and not sexy, so average it was nearly invisible—_ but paused before closing it. 

“Are you going to be alright driving my car?” she asked Veda seriously. Her voice, at least, was unchanged. 

In profile I could see Veda flash her a sunny smile. “When am I not? I _love_ driving.” 

Disguised-Kim just rolled her eyes and shook her head. “You break it, you buy it. See you later.” 

“ _Alvida_ ,” Veda replied, gaily throwing the car into reverse and darting into traffic again with the careless aplomb that most people only manage when the vehicle they’re driving is stolen. 

Marcone, through all of this, had said nothing, though I was keenly aware of the weight of his regard. And even though he probably wasn’t holding it against me, _I_ was holding my failure against me. That I couldn’t even take a freaking silencing spell off him. 

And apparently I wasn’t the only wizard in the car who felt that way. At the first stoplight we came to, Veda put the car into park and twisted in her chair to examine Marcone again with her Sight. From the look on her face when she studied Marcone, I was willing to bet that she wasn’t taking too kindly to this encroachment of her territory either. After a moment she flicked it off, blinking behind her glasses and withdrawing to her seat again.

“I don’t know what to tell you,” she admitted with a sigh. “Dresden’s already done what I would have tried. If the wizard who cast it really is using their own energy to power it, then the only way to get it off is to kill the wizard.” She cracked a sour smile in the rearview mirror. “Or ask them very nicely to remove it.”

“Neither of which is going to be easy, if this wizard is half as strong as he’s shaping up to be,” I pointed out. 

I think we both looked to Marcone then, as though hoping he’d be able to give us some insight.

“The light’s green,” he observed.

 

We’d gone from city to suburbia and driven past a sign that read WELCOME TO INDIANA, CROSSROADS OF AMERICA before it occurred to me to ask where we were going. 

“A safehouse,” Marcone replied. 

“I see.” So first he had faked both our deaths, and now he was taking me with him as he went to ground. And then, because I’m a smartass, I couldn’t help adding, “I hope this safehouse is safer than the last one.” 

Marcone didn’t take offense, just gazed out the window at the low-slung landscape of scrubby trees and power lines, dotted with the occasional gas station. “As do I. Considering that only Veda and Kim know about this one, I think it ought to be.”

Which sounded to me like he’d _really_ put all his eggs in one basket for this operation, a basket named Veda, but I wasn’t in much position to object. 

It was a long car ride and nobody was feeling particularly chatty—good thing I had plenty to worry about, or I might have been bored. We crossed into Michigan and I was just starting to get a niggling sense of deja vu, when suddenly we were slowing in front of a house that was entirely too familiar. 

“What the hell…?” I demanded. I had been here before. In fact, I had fought a warlock dabbling in black magic, sex magic, and manufacturing magic-fuelled cocaine from his basement here. Last I’d seen, it had been on fire with a giant bloody hole blown in the living room wall. Now it looked as perky and innocuous as any other lakefront home, rebuilt and whitewashed clean of its former sins, but I could still feel traces of dark magic like a sewage scent in the air. 

“Behold, your safehouse,” Marcone said with wry flourish. Veda had pulled directly into the garage and set the door rumbling closed behind us. The interior was dim and the single bulb cast stark shadows as we climbed out.

“You bought this place? Even after all that bad mojo went down here?” 

“I owned it all along; Mr. Sells was renting. It was Veda who suggested that the residual contamination could mask more recent spellworking.” 

“I—” Actually, that was pretty clever. Part of the problem with trying to work magic in secret is that if the wrong people wander by, they’re likely to sense it. Here, though, the place was already covered in magic, like a high shelf badly in need of dusting. It had been that way for years and everyone knew it, which meant they weren’t likely to notice a little more dust.

“Yeah, I guess it could,” I conceded grudgingly. “It’s still pretty unpleasant though.” 

Veda had produced the keys to the house, and now we followed her from the darkened garage into a bright kitchen, slightly cloudy afternoon light streaming in through the windows. It opened onto the living room, where the curtains were drawn back to give a gorgeous view of the lake. I had to admit, it was a nice house, the kind I could never dream of affording myself. 

“I love what you’ve done with the place,” I said. “So much better in blue than in gore-red and entrails-brown.” 

“The windows have been fixed so that they’ll show only an empty house,” Veda was telling Marcone, apparently having decided to ignore me. “You don’t have to worry about anyone seeing in, but it’s hard to effectively mute an entire house, so you’ll want to be careful how much noise you make. Talking is fine, but it probably wouldn’t hold up if you decided to throw a party.” 

“I doubt that will be a problem,” Marcone said. 

“I’ve rigged up an early warning system—it will alert you if humans set foot on the actual property or if anything preternatural comes within two hundred yards, including wizards. The house itself doesn’t have a threshold to work with, so I reinforced the walls as best I could without drawing attention to the place. I’d estimate that it can hold out indefinitely against mediocre wizards or creatures under a ton. Your best bet, though, is to lay low and hope you don’t get noticed.” 

“Security through obscurity,” I muttered. 

Veda seemed to take that as criticism and shot me a dirty glare. “I believe it was security contractors with loose lips that sank his last safehouse, so yes, security through obscurity. It’s the best we could do under the circumstances.”

Actually, it had been the slightly-less-than-loyal woman Marcone had been sleeping with—was still sleeping with?—who’d sold him out before, but this didn’t seem like the ideal time to explain how I knew that.

“It’s excellent,” Marcone told her, forestalling me with a light hand on my arm. A hand that he then didn’t remove. “And in the event that the house is breached?” 

She cracked a thin smile. “There’s an arsenal in the basement. Between that and Mr. Dresden’s talents, you should be able to hold off any attackers long enough to escape.”

Veda pulled back the sleeve of her overcoat to check her watch. “Alright, Kim should be arriving any minute now, and then the two of us will get out of your way.”

“What’s she doing?” I asked. What, me, suspicious? Of course not. 

“Picking up a rental car. I assume you don’t want to be stranded here.” 

Just then I felt a ripple run through the air, one that seemed to squeeze over me as it went. Not precisely unpleasant, but it sure got my attention. 

“Ah, the human-sensing ward,” Veda said with satisfaction. “That would be her now.” 

Sure enough, I heard the garage door opening again and a minute later Kim let herself into the kitchen, dangling a plain set of keys from one hand and twirling the illusion necklace in the other. 

“Your chariot, sir,” she said with a small smile for Marcone as she passed the keys over. Which was monstrously unfair, I thought, that she would joke with Marcone but wouldn’t spit on me if I were on fire. And I hadn’t even done anything to deserve it, this time. 

Veda patted her coat down to fish out the keys to the Cadillac. “Alright, so you’ve got the car, the keys, guns, a computer with fax machine upstairs that I’d keep Mr. Dresden away from, the fridge is fully stocked—anything else?”

“I think that covers it,” Marcone said.

“Well then, it was a pleasure doing business with you.” She shook hands firmly with Marcone. “Call me if you have any follow-up work, and feel free to let Mr. Dresden double-check the enchantments on the house, if you like.”

Using my Wizard’s Sight, she meant, though she had to have known that there was _no way in hell_ I was looking at this house with my Sight, not with the abominations that had been committed here before Marcone took up residence.

“Alright, then we’re off.” She turned, twirling her keys. “Kim, you want to get lunch on the way back?”

I couldn’t make out Kim’s reply as they passed through the kitchen back into the garage, just her tone, trying to be aloof but sounding slightly indulgent as they faded out of earshot. 

Neither of us said anything as the muted noise of the car’s engine sounded easily through the empty house. A few minutes later the garage door rumbled shut again, and then we were truly alone. No goons waiting outside, no audience, no irate werewolves beating down the door, no Veda in the front seat as a chaperone. Just me and John Marcone, more alone than we had ever been during our long acquaintance.

He broke the silence first, letting out a great sigh and walking over to collapse on the couch. The leather creaked under his weight as he sank into the cushions, closing his eyes and looking profoundly weary. I decided that was a really good idea, considering how early and how rudely I’d been awakened this morning. Today had been crazy and it wasn’t even five o’clock yet. I flopped down on the other end of the couch from Marcone.

I was tired enough that I probably could have fallen asleep on the floor, but even so, that couch was magnificent, swallowing me up like a pile of pillows. I think I might groaned from the sheer pleasure of it, because when I opened my eyes again Marcone was giving me an odd, speculative look.

“So what’s the plan?” I asked, hoping it didn’t involve ever having to leave this couch.

The humor in his expression faded. “To place my well-being entirely in your mostly-competent hands, Mr. Dresden.”

It took me a moment to decode that. “You can’t be serious,” I said flatly, my heart sinking.

“Believe me, I’m no more thrilled by this than you are.”

“You don’t _have_ a plan.” I was incredulous. “Your entire goal was to maneuver us this far, then dump the problem in my lap and hope that I could figure it out from here.”

He shrugged.

“Hell’s bells,” I muttered, bringing a hand up to scrub over my eyes. “Okay, so do you have any _helpful_ information locked behind your teeth, or are we starting from scratch?”

“Information is my stock in trade.” Which was a yes, obviously, but man, was I getting sick of sideways answers.

“Okay, so… is it someone I’ve tangled with before?”

In the past, I would have interpreted his silence as measured, possibly suspicious. Now I realized that I hadn’t phrased the question in a way that would give him any room to answer, since either a yes or a no would be acknowledging the existence of this other wizard, and the spell didn’t allow even that. Stars and bloody stones, this was a pain in the ass. And it seemed to be here to stay.

“Hmm,” Marcone replied after a time. “You realize that even though our social circles now overlap more than they did in the past, I don’t know what all acquaintances we have in common.” 

Aha, so it was someone (or someone _s_ ) that he didn’t know whether or not I knew. I could make the full list later of what critters we had battled together, but that eliminated the Denarians and most of the top-dog vampires from the get-go. Good, I’d had enough of both groups lately. 

“So are we talking about a group of baddies, or one guy flying solo?” 

Marcone gave me a tolerant smile. “I believe everyone these days employs help, with the notable exception of yourself.” 

I was a little surprised the spell let him get away with that, because it seemed like a fairly direct answer. I supposed it managed to slip past the censors because he’d couched it in generalities. 

“Though most people of power are reluctant to trust others they consider to be of a similar caliber,” he continued mildly, his voice at odds with the significant look he gave me.

“Oh!” I said as I got what he was trying to communicate. “You mean it’s one guy with lackeys, not several heavy-hitters working together. Gotcha, message received.”

He didn’t nod—probably couldn’t—but the way his posture relaxed was encouraging.

“Say, the wizard who cast it,” I said as a sudden thought struck me. “His name wouldn’t happen to be Jonathan, would it? Jonathan Williams?”

Even with the silencing spell, he ought to be able to—

“I don’t know anyone by that name,” he replied without hesitation.

Okay, so was pretty unequivocal. It would have been too easy anyway, that the rogue wizard making bombs happened to be the same rogue wizard casting silencing spells. Still, I doubted it was a coincidence—these things never are.

“Alright, then... well, considering that you haven’t tried to correct my use of ‘guy,’ I’m going to hazard a guess and say I got the sex of our mystery villain correct?”

If I was expecting a cookie for that deduction, I didn’t get it. “Would you like a sandwich?” he asked diffidently. 

I blinked. 

He smiled. “That’s not a trick question, Mr. Dresden; sometimes a sandwich is just a sandwich. I’m going to make one for myself, would you like one too?” 

“Uhm. Sure, I guess.” 

He climbed off the couch and went into the kitchen. I weighed the merits of both options for a minute, and then reluctantly abandoned the bliss of the couch to follow him. 

The wind had picked up off the lake, and the bushes outside the kitchen window were whipping back and forth furiously. I could hear it whistling over the roof and past the eaves, the house feeling unnaturally silent with just the two of us. I spent a minute in front of the window, peering out toward our nearest neighbors where a middle-aged woman was on her dock trying to lash down the sails on her boat before it blew away in the wind. 

“Do you know where they’re holed up?” I asked when I finally turned away from the window. “Our mystery villains, I mean.”

I was tempted to randomly assign them a name, because “mystery villain” just sounded so cheesy. When I darted a glance at Marcone, he was looking distinctly peeved and sawing off slices of turkey with more force than strictly required.

I sighed. “Okay, forget it. This is getting us nowhere.”

God, it was like one of those baffling and infuriating zen puzzles, trying to define something by its absence. I lifted my hands to scrub over my eyes again, wishing futilely that when I removed them I would be someplace else and this whole mess would have resolved itself. Because it’s not as if I _like_ having my life threatened by deadly monsters, but the thing to be said for demons or fae or vampires charging right at you is that at least you know what you’re dealing with. Give me a brawl and I know what to do—hit the other guy until he stops hitting back. I didn’t know what to do with this, and what was worse, I didn’t even know how to begin figuring it out.

Something nudged my arm. “Harry?”

I opened my eyes to see Marcone offering me a sandwich on a paper plate, cut into neat triangles and with a side of sliced carrots, no less. Just when I’d thought the day couldn’t get any weirder, Chicago’s kingpin and gone and made me a sandwich. With carrots on the side. And would probably get short with me if I tried to weasel out of eating my vegetables.

I laughed, because sometimes the alternative is crying.


	6. Chapter 6

Lunch went a long way toward restoring my equilibrium. Low blood sugar, go figure. In any case, the sandwich itself gave me no answers, but I now was ready to start calling around to people who might help me find them.

“Okay, so my apprentice,” I said to Marcone around a mouthful of turkey. “I can’t remember if you’ve met her or not. Michael’s daughter, her name is Molly.”

Marcone shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

“Well, I’ve been training her for a few years now, but her specialty is actually a lot different from mine. I’m more geared for combat—you want explosions and tornadoes, I’m your man, but Molly’s better at the detail work. She also has an affinity for delicate psychic magics”—I didn’t mention the trouble that had landed her in—“and there’s a chance, a small chance, mind you, that she might somehow be able to get into your head and bypass the silencing spell altogether. Though I’m reluctant to try that except as a last resort.”

And I did mean _last_. Although I was pretty sure we could slide it through on a technicality—since we would have Marcone’s informed consent, and the letter of the law forbid _invading_ the mind of another, not _entering_ altogether—it was still dancing dangerously close to the edge. I didn’t want to give the Council any more ammunition against Molly, and I didn’t have the slightest idea what the risks to Marcone might be.

He took that in, and then nodded cautiously. “Very well. I don’t relish the thought of having my brain prodded by an amateur, but with you to vouch for her I don’t suppose I have a choice. Go on.”

“I also need to talk to lieutenant—er, sergeant—Murphy and see if anything else weird has happened lately. Usually when a fish this big is making a move, they can’t keep from stirring up the water a little.”

He looked not altogether pleased with that, but gave a resigned shrug. “I suspect you also need to apologize for vanishing so abruptly this afternoon. Though if you please, _don’t_ give her the location of this safehouse.”

“I wasn’t planning to,” I replied, a little stung. Not that Murphy would ever willingly betray me, but I was sharp enough to realize that this was strictly need-to-know information. “Anyway, I’d also like to call Warden Luccio. With the Accords breached and a dangerously powerful wizard in town, even the White Council can’t keep their heads in the sand—”

His head swung up immediately, eyes blazing. “ _NO_. ”

“Marcone, don’t be an idiot, they can help!” I snapped. “I don’t like them any more than you do—in fact, I think they’re a bunch of hypocritical, self-righteous jerks. I know you’re not their best buddy, and they’re none too fond of me either, but this is exactly the sort of situation that the White Council was created to deal with. If there’s a rogue wizard running amok, I don’t know how you expect to contain him without calling in other wizards!”

Marcone’s hand clamped down over my wrist, hard enough to leave bruises. “Dresden,” he bit out, enunciating each word as sharply as a knife. “ _Don’t call your White Council_.”

“But…” I protested, trailing off when forced to confront the intensity of his gaze. Anger, yes, but something else as well.

“I _don’t trust_ them.”

It hit me. That something else was fear.

“Sweet Jesus on a pogo stick,” I breathed. “You don’t trust them because it was someone on the White Council who did this to you.”

I should have seen it sooner. I mean, I had suspected for ages that some of the Council wasn’t quite playing by the same rules as the rest of us—I had, in fact, gone so far as to dub this alternate hierarchy the Black Council. And, hello, where better to look for _really freaking powerful wizards_ than in the elite, members-only wizard club? The Denarians had inadvertently confirmed the existence of this so-called Black Council, and it remained one of those things that I tried really hard not to think about, in the vain hope that it would go away. Because even though I knew it existed, I couldn’t do much about it.

But then again, Marcone wasn’t exactly on a first-name basis with any of the wardens, present company excepted. How would he have even been able to recognize them, let alone identify them as a member of the Council, unless…

“Were they _wearing their uniform_?” I demanded, affronted on behalf of an organization that I had always done my damnedest to resent.

“Your uniforms are quite distinctive,” Marcone replied crossly, without missing a beat.

I didn’t say anything out loud, but my mind helpfully furnished a few of the foulest curses I had heard Justin du Morne use during my internship. _Arrogance_ , was my first thought as soon as I was back to thinking rationally. Unbelievable arrogance, that someone would wear the mantle of the White Council while they proceeded to make a despicable mockery of everything it stood for. But then, bad guys do like their irony.

“I’m sorry,” I found myself saying quietly to Marcone. I looked up at him. “I mean, I still don’t like the White Council. I think they’re narrow-minded and dogmatic in the worst ways, but they do know the difference between right and wrong. Hell, they know it better than I do sometimes.” I gave a rueful chuckle. “Unfortunately, there’s... been some dissent in the ranks lately.”

Marcone listened in silence while I filled him in on my suspicions about the Black Council, knuckles resting against his lips intently. When I was finished, he considered it for a long moment before deciding, “That explains a lot.”

Which left me feeling inexplicably guilty for not having warned him sooner. Though seriously, how was I supposed to know this would happen?

While I was still working through the ramifications of that, Marcone clapped his hands on his knees and pushed himself to his feet. “Call your apprentice,” he said. “And Sergeant Murphy, if you must, but do me a favor and limit it to those two for now.”

“What are you going to do?” I asked, frowning as he walked toward the stairs.

“Take a shower.”

Fair enough. I sat there, deep in thought, until I heard the water running upstairs, then climbed to my feet and headed off to the phone in the kitchen. I knew the number to Michael’s house by heart, considering that we’d been working together for nearly a decade and he was one of my closest friends. Michael picked up after two rings.

“Hello?” came the familiar baritone.

“Hey, Michael, this is—”

“Hold on a sec, I’ll get him. DAD!”

Oh lord, that was _Daniel._ Since when was he old enough to hit the low notes? It seemed like only yesterday the kid had come up to my waist. Damn it, kids weren’t supposed to make you feel this old when they weren’t even _your_ kids.

I heard the shuffle as the phone was handed off. “Hello, this is Michael.” 

“Michael—hey, it’s me, Harry.”

“Harry,” he said evenly, not quite a question.

“Yeah, I’m alright. Not dead, anyway. And it’s a long story, but it’s probably safer for me if people think I am.”

There was a long, unbroken silence during which I felt the urge to fidget under the weight of Michael’s regard. And realized I should have told him sooner, rather than letting him continue thinking that I was dead. I would have been pissed off too, if I’d been trying to come to terms with his death when he was actually off gallivanting about with crime lords.

“It’s good to hear from you,” Michael said at last. “We’ve all been pretty upset around here.”

Stab, stab. “I’m sorry I didn’t have the chance to tell you sooner,” I said, prevaricating a little. “But I need to talk to Molly, I think she can help.”

“Certainly. You don’t mind if I tell Charity, do you? She’s taking this harder than you probably would have expected her to.”

Stab, _twist_. “Oh. Right, of course.”

Over the phone I could hear a knock and then Michael’s voice some distance from the receiver saying, “Molly? Telephone.”

I heard Molly’s voice murmur something indistinct, a clatter as she picked up a different extension, and then a moment later it was Molly on the line.

“Hello?”

“Grasshopper?”

“ _Harry!_ ”

“The one and only,” I agreed, trying to be light but once again feeling that odd, painful knot in my chest at being forcibly reminded that people actually cared.

“What happened?” she demanded in a rushed whisper. “I heard you were _dead!_ They said you went on a date or something with _Marcone_ and then he shot you, they had the body and everything, and Mom and Dad have been—”

“Listen,” I interrupted, uncomfortable with the thought of Michael and Charity grieving for me. “I don’t have time to explain everything right now, but we’ve got a rogue warden in town, they’ve put a silencing spell and who knows what else on Marcone.”

There was a brief pause. “Didn’t you say that silencing spells were really illegal?” 

“Oh yeah. I plan to write this guy a _strongly worded_ letter when we’re through. But for now, I need your help.”

“What do you need me to do?” she asked without hesitation.

“I need you to go to my house and pick up Bob and some equipment for me. I’m alive and as safe as I can be under the circumstances, but I’d like to keep a low profile.”

I gave her the list of things I wanted her to bring, trying not to ask for everything in my laboratory. I wanted to be thorough, because I didn’t know what I was going to need, but her little hatchback was even smaller than the Beetle. 

I also asked her to call Thomas for me, since I had his number written down at home but not memorized. He needed to know that, whatever he may have heard to the contrary, I was alive and would he please feed my animals? Before letting her go, I reiterated that she should, under no circumstances, trust _anyone_ else with this information. She told me that I should have been a writer for the _X-Files_ , but sounded shaken enough that I believed she was taking this seriously.

Then I called Murphy, who was justifiably pissed about my disappearing act and subjected me to a brief rant on that score— _Two hours, Harry, I spent two goddamned hours wondering what happened to you—_ before finally she grumpily gave in and asked, “Alright, so what’d you find that had you tearing out of there so fast?”

“Well, I ran a tracking spell on the blood…”

“Uh-huh.”

“And I came up with nothing. The spell fizzed out.” I hadn’t decided beforehand how much I was going to tell her about Marcone, but now it seemed like the less said, the better. I trusted Murphy to the ends of the earth, but this was need-to-know information, and it wasn’t even _my_ information.

“Okay… so what does that mean?” she asked.

“One of two things—that the source has crossed into the Nevernever, or… that the source is dead.”

There was a pause while she processed that. “Oh, _hell_ ,” she whispered vehemently.

“What?”

“Harry, you realize what this means, right? If Marcone is dead?”

“Uhm…”

“He _has_ no clear second-in-command. As soon as the bottom feeders realize that his throne is up for grabs, it’s going to be an all-out battle royale.” I could hear her cursing again, a little further away from the mouthpiece.

“Hey now, let’s not jump the gun, Murph,” I cut in hastily, trying to backpedal without giving everything away. “We don’t know for sure that he’s dead.”

“But you just said—”

“There are ways to fake it,” I prevaricated. “I’m investigating that now.”

I was expecting another round of all-too-astute questions from Murphy about what exactly that entailed, but luck was on my side for once.

“Ah, speaking of investigations…” Her voice trailed off and I heard paperwork shifting. “Before I forget—I got the records on that Jonathan Williams guy. You still need those?”

“Oh. Sure.” With everything else going on, Tabby and her problem had completely slipped my mind. But this was what I called Murphy to look for, right? Other weird stuff. “Go for it.”

“Alright—Jonathan Ailill Williams, originally from California, got his bachelor’s in political science from UCLA, then moved to Chicago in ’99 for law school.”

“I’m more interested in his family. Do you have anything from before the move?”

“One sec... okay, says he was born June 16, 1979, to Jonathan Williams Sr. and Jacqueline Williams, _née_ Borlais, his father was a painter and his mother was a model. Two older brothers named Isaiah and Daniel. Parents divorced when Jonathan was nine and it was the father, surprisingly, who kept custody of all three kids.”

“That is unusual,” I said, frowning. Unless the god-fearing man who had named his kids Jonathan, Daniel, and Isaiah suddenly discovered that his wife was a witch, and decided he’d be damned before he left them in her clutches.

“And probably says that Jacqueline didn’t even try,” Murphy added. “Mothers usually get custody if they want it. In any case, she dropped off the radar shortly after the divorce. Nobody’s seen her in over a decade, she’s missing and presumed dead.”

Curiouser and curiouser.

“Jon Sr. got remarried after a few years, at which point Isaiah, who’d just turned seventeen, went to court and got himself declared an emancipated minor, then challenged his dad for custody of his younger brothers, claiming that their father was mentally unfit to raise children.”

“Happy family,” I grunted.

“You’re telling me. He didn’t win, and then the dad turned around and successfully got a restraining order put on Isaiah to keep him away from his younger brothers. There are two notes in his file regarding incidents where he was charged with being in violation of the order, but both times they were dropped before going to court. Isaiah sued for custody _again_ after he was a legal adult, and this time he won. Daniel was fifteen at the time, and Jon Jr. was twelve.”

“Where the hell does an emancipated minor get the money to support not one, but _two_ younger siblings?” I wondered aloud.

“Trust fund for all three kids, set up by his mother’s family,” Murphy answered, clearly having anticipated the question.

“Huh.” Having money wasn’t conclusive, of course, but people with strong magic and few scruples did have a tendency to accrue a lot of it. I wondered how much Tabby had known about all this. From the sound of it, next to nothing. “What about an Uncle Cary? Did you manage to find one of those?”

“Nope. No Uncle Cary on either side of the family.”

Well, it might have been too much to hope that this Cary was actually a relation. Jonathan probably just found it easier to introduce the man as an uncle; uncles raise fewer questions than “mysterious older gentleman friend.”

“Though if you go back a few generations, his great-grandfather on his mother’s side was named Carolinus,” Murphy offered.

 _Bingo._ It wasn’t conclusive, of course, but I would have bet good money that he was our man. Because it’s _much_ easier to introduce a forty-something-looking man as an “uncle” rather than “my preternaturally long-lived wizard great-grandfather.”

“What’s his full name?” I asked, unable to keep the eagerness out of my voice.

“Carolinus Alberic Borlais,” she said, and I could hear her interest at my sudden interest. “Why?”

“Because I have the sneaking suspicion that he’s still kicking around.”

“Ah, so this is one of your guys?” she said knowingly.

“It sure looks that way. What else did you find?”

“What else do you want? Transcripts, employment history, traffic tickets—I’ve got twelve pages of results on this guy, and a meeting in ten minutes.”

“Could you fax it to me?” I asked, my eyes falling on a post-it note next to the phone where Veda had left FAX NUMBER and PHONE NUMBER. 

“You have a fax machine now?” Murphy returned with heavy skepticism. “ _You?_ ”

“I’m sort of... squatting at the moment,” I temporized. 

“Hmm.” I heard papers shuffling. “You realize that if you’re not actively consulting on a case, it isn’t kosher to share this kind of information with you.”

“It’s mostly public record anyway, isn’t it? Please, I’ll be your best friend,” I promised with the vocal equivalent of puppy dog eyes.

“The things I do for you, Dresden,” she muttered, long-suffering. In the background I could hear her keyboard clacking as she took down the number I dictated. “Anything else you needed?”

“Nope. You’re a doll, Murphy.”

“Better than you deserve,” she agreed.

I got off the phone, my mind racing. So Jonathan Williams was almost assuredly from a family with a history of magic, and still in touch with granddaddy Cary. Which meant that if he was breaking the Laws of Magic, he probably wasn’t doing so in ignorance. I wondered how powerful he was—if he was just enough of a wizard to break his laptop, or if he, like Elaine, had intentionally let the Council underestimate his powers so they’d leave him be.

 _He comes home smelling like rotten eggs_ , Tabby had said. That meant either wielding hellfire or summoning demons, neither of which are exactly small-time parlor tricks. And he’d been deliberately, if somewhat circuitously, trying to get my attention. For what? So that I would go to his house and trigger the wards there? I couldn’t think of another reason, though if he were gunning for me, there seemed to be much more efficient ways to go about it. Unless he knew that he didn’t have the juice to take me down in a fair fight.

I’d dug out a pad of paper and was jotting down my thoughts when the wards hit me again, this time _thump-thump_ in quick succession and much stronger than before, a feeling like biting down on a live wire that left my teeth buzzing uncomfortably. Alright, so that was what it felt like when non-humans tripped the alarm, duly noted. Since there had been two of them I presumed it was heralding Molly and Bob’s arrival, but I stayed on guard until I saw Molly’s hatchback roll to a stop in front of the house. She hauled a pair of laden duffel bags out of the car and lugged them up the walk. I met her at the door to avoid tripping any fussy wards.

She grinned when she saw me, visibly relieved, as if she hadn’t quite believed that I was alive until she’d seen me with her own eyes. “Hey there. Looking pretty spry for a dead guy,” she said impertinently. “I’d hug you, but my hands are full with hauling your crap around. What happened to chivalry, huh?”

“None of your lip, kiddo,” I snorted, giving her a mock-cuff on the head but dutifully taking the bags. “Come on inside before the neighbors see you.”

She followed me into the house, looking around the hallway appraisingly.

“Nice place,” she remarked, then wrinkled her nose a little. “Except for the… smell. What happened here?”

She was referring to the taint I’d mentioned earlier. My magical nose, so to speak, had grown accustomed to it and stopped noticing.

“A black magic guy lived here a few years back, this was his base of operations. We’re using the residue to cover up my presence.”

“Wait a minute, who’s ‘we’?” Molly asked with a frown, just as Marcone’s voice floated down from the second story.

“Harry? I felt the alarm go off—I trust that’s one of your people?”

A moment later he came sauntering down the stairs, and I felt my jaw hit the ground. He was wearing only a pair of lounge pants slung low on his hips, dark hair damp and tousled from the shower and a towel draped over his shoulders. And yeah, I’d known his office was right over a _fitness center_ , but it hadn’t occurred to me that he actually availed himself of said fitness center. Looking at him now, it was pretty damned obvious that he did, because he was _gorgeous_ and way more toned than a man his age had any right to be. 

My mouth had gone dry, and from the small, sputtering noises that Molly was suddenly making, it seemed that hers had too. When he looked up and caught me staring, the private, propriety smile he gave me made my stomach do an entirely inappropriate back flip.

“I—ah—Harry?” Molly squeaked. “I’m sorry, I didn’t know that you had, uhm…” When she managed to drag her eyes off his abs and up to his face, her shock was comic. “Is that _Marcone?!_ ”

Marcone descended the last few stairs to join us, and then brushed past me so close that I could smell his expensive shampoo as he gave Molly a winning smile and leaned forward to extend his hand. “Please, call me John. You must be Molly; it’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance.”

“Ah—yeah. Molly Carpenter. Nice to meet you too,” she managed to stammer out, taking his hand automatically. “I wasn’t, uhm, expecting… You look different when you’re not covered in blood.”

“Oh for god’s sake, Marcone, go put some clothes on before you give my apprentice an aneurism,” I snapped, trying to tear my eyes off the sleek curve of his back where it met the waistband of his pants and not quite succeeding.

Marcone’s look of innocent surprise was entirely unconvincing, tempered as it was with a smirk. “Of course, Harry. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to discomfit you in front of Miss Carpenter.”

“What, what?!” a disembodied voice demanded from the depths of the duffel bag. “Somebody’s not wearing clothes? Let me out, I want to see!”

“I— _what?_ Not me, her! She’s the one who’s discomfited!” I sputtered, ignoring Bob entirely and then belatedly adding, “And don’t call me Harry!”

But Molly had recovered from her surprise at being confronted by a half-naked mob boss, and was now looking deceptively wide-eyed and ingenuous. “Oh no, you don’t have to change on my account,” she said innocently, almost managing to keep a straight face.

“She is. Extremely. Discomfited,” I growled, planting my hands on Marcone’s back and pushing him back toward the stairs.

“I wanna seeeeee!” Bob wailed. “Come on, you guys never let me have any fun!”

Marcone was laughing, rich and deeply amused, I was trying to ignore how good all that warm, shower-damp skin felt under my hands, Molly had given way to giggles, and Bob was still hollering fit to drown out the rest of us.

A mafioso, two wizards, and a talking skull walk into a safehouse—if this was the set-up, I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear the punchline.

 

“Dude, Harry!” Molly hissed as soon as Marcone was upstairs again. “ _That’s_ John Marcone? He’s a freaking—”

I clapped a hand over her mouth. “Don’t finish that thought, grasshopper. I may not be able to ground you, but I can bust your ass back down to litterbox duty until you’re thirty.”

Not that shutting her up in time helped much, since my brain had already helpfully proffered up “babe” and “sex god” as possibilities, with options on “silver fox.”

Molly removed my hand, looking aggrieved. “I was only going to say that I think he’s very debonair,” she informed me with dignity. “And very fit.”

“Also, a criminal,” I snapped under my breath, hoping her voice hadn’t carried. Marcone’s ego didn’t need any help. “And old enough to be your _father_.”

“Some people know how to appreciate older men,” she said loftily.

I shuddered and groaned, then buried my face in my hands. “Oh my god, I am never having teenagers. _Never_ ,” I vowed.

“Not with a boyfriend like that, you’re not,” Molly agreed smugly.

“ _Marcone is not my boyfriend!_ ” I insisted, though I was beginning to get the sneaking suspicion that this was a losing battle.

“So can someone get me out of this bag?” Bob asked mournfully. “Now that all the excitement is safely over.”

Molly took pity on him and dug around in the duffel bag until she managed to produce the skull.

“So on the drive over I updated Bob about the situation,” she told me. “He said he has some experience with silencing spells.”

“Mostly in helping cast them,” Bob agreed brightly. “Too bad you never needed to shut anyone up, boss, because I make a _mean_ silencing spell.” The amount of pride in his voice was mildly unsettling, but I supposed it was good that one of us knew what we were doing. “It’s harder than you’d think, too, because so much of our communication isn’t in the words, it’s in the delivery—facial expressions, intonation, gestures and body language. A wizard who doesn’t know what they’re doing is likely to miss a lot of the contingencies. Granted, _I_ know what I’m doing.”

“Anyway,” Molly cut in, also sounding unnerved by Bob’s enthusiasm for the subject. “I was thinking that even if we can’t figure out how to get it off, Bob might know some ways to get around it.”

I gave her a nod of approval. “Good thinking. So let’s get to work—grab a bag and take it upstairs, there’s no sense unpacking here.”

Granted, I didn’t actually know where I was supposed to be sleeping. I figured that a house of this size was bound to have a few extra bedrooms, and sure enough, when we trooped up to the second floor I found half a dozen doors opening off the main hallway. There was a light coming from beneath one, which I assumed to be the room Marcone had claimed for himself. There was another door with a handwritten sign reading “COMPUTER ROOM. WIZARDS KEEP OUT. THIS MEANS YOU.” I wondered who’d made it, since it didn’t seem like Marcone’s handwriting, or his style, really. The next door I tried turned out to be a bathroom, but the one after that yielded a tidy, impersonal guest bedroom.

“Victory,” I declared, unloading the heavy duffel that was cutting off circulation to my shoulder and laying it carefully on the bed. Molly gave Bob the place of honor, setting him on an empty shelf over the room’s functional little desk, then seated herself cross-legged on my bed while I unpacked.

“If I missed anything, I can go back for it later tonight,” she offered “I was careful, too. I thought somebody might be keeping an eye on the place so I parked a couple blocks away and then walked over under a veil.”

“Good idea,” I agreed.

“Your phone rang twice while I was there. It’s too bad you don’t have an answering machine.”

More like too bad an answering machine would never stay functional for more than two days at a time. “I hope you didn’t answer it?” I asked.

She scoffed. “Please, give me some credit. Though it occurred to me that I could say I was a neighbor there to feed your cat.”

“Hmm.” I drew out several sealed Tupperware containers that Molly had packed and laid them out on the shelf. “Well it’s probably for the best that you didn’t. Did you call Thomas?”

“Yeah, he was at work. He said he had to stop by his apartment to pack an overnight bag, but then he’d go over to your place.”

There was knock even though the door was open, and I looked up to see Marcone framed in the doorway. “Mind if I join you?”

“More the merrier,” I said blithely, waving him to a seat in the desk chair. He took it gracefully, wheeling it around to straddle backwards and folding his arms over the backrest. He wasn’t shirtless anymore and I had to tell myself firmly that I wasn’t disappointed, honest. I was suddenly much more conscious of his sex appeal now; I mean, he looked good in suits too, but Marcone in casual wear was a novelty. Also, his thin black t-shirt hugged his muscles and didn’t leave much to the imagination. 

“Hmmm,” Bob said, peering at Marcone speculatively. I was bracing myself for a round of Bob’s special brand of insinuations, but for once he kept them to himself. “Yes, very economical spell, gets the job done without being too restrictive. You know, it’s a shame you didn’t have a reason to go downstairs when you picked Harry up for the date, because I would have noticed it straight away.”

Marcone, considering that this was the first time he’d encountered Bob, was taking the whole talking, glowing skull spectacle with remarkable aplomb. “Well, live and learn,” he said philosophically. “And you would be…?”

“That’s Bob,” I replied before Bob could answer. “He’s like a… magical encyclopedia.”

I didn’t add that he was also a spirit of air and intellect whose powers were frankly terrifying and moreover, completely at the disposal of whatever nutjob happened to have their hands on him, and that the only reason there weren’t wizards breaking down my door to destroy and/or steal him for themselves was because everyone thought he had already been destroyed decades ago. See, Marcone wasn’t the only one with need-to-know information.

“Ah,” Marcone said, as if his curiosity had been satisfied, that being a talking, encyclopedic skull was on par with having an unusual last name and nothing more needed be said about it. “It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

“Pleasure, eh?” Bob asked, tilting his head speculatively and blinking one eyesocket to give Marcone a wink. “Get Dresden to let me out of the skull, and we’ll see about pleasure.”

Great, just what I needed, my apprentice _and_ my incorporeal sidekick hitting on my... Marcone. I wondered briefly if they’d planned this in advance, and concluded that I wouldn’t put it past either of them.

“ _Anyway,_ ” I ground out. “If we could get back to the teensy matter of a silencing spell and rogue Black Council wizards…?”

“Right, sorry boss. So Marcone, I hear you have Tam Veda working for you. Pretty hot stuff, huh?” he leered.

“Bob,” I began, finally losing the fraying edges of my temper. “I will buy you all the porn you want when we’re done with this case, but right now we don’t have time for your—”

“Oh, I’m sorry, were _you_ the expert on silencing spells?” Bob inquired. “Because I could have sworn it was me. Now sit back and shut up while I do my job.”

Annoyed and chastened, I shut my mouth.

“Mr. Veda does have a certain exotic appeal,” Marcone allowed politely, as if I hadn’t spoken. “Not my type though, so to speak.”

“Did you ever meet Luccio?” Bob asked, and I felt myself tense. “She’s a warden, one of Dresden’s few friends on the White Council. Freaking _knockout_ , man.”

“Can’t say I’ve had the pleasure.”

“Unfortunately, when it comes to wizards, those two seem to be the exception and not the rule,” Bob confided sadly. “I mean, look at the rest of the Council. You’ve got Dresden’s ugly mug—”

“Hey, now—!”

“I don’t think it’s so bad,” Marcone disagreed mildly.

“—and that hardass Morgan who was on his tail like a tick for ages, just trying to catch him in a fuck-up. Seriously, have you seen this guy? Forget ugly _sticks_ , Morgan fell off the ugly _tree_ and hit every branch on the way down.”

Molly was giggling into her hand, and even Marcone was suppressing a smile. “Again, I don’t think I’ve had the pleasure.”

“Then there’s the Merlin, who has all the sex appeal of a particularly smarmy used-car salesman. But then again, they also say that power is the ultimate aphrodisiac, so…” The skull gave a theatrical little shudder. “Let’s not go there.”

Marcone chuckled. “Well I can’t judge, since I’ve never met the Merlin and I can’t imagine any situation in which I’d like to.”

“You and me both, brother,” Bob concurred fervently. “So who else have we got? Oh right, I forgot about Ramirez. He’s not bad, I suppose. If you like virgins.”

Molly made a sound like she was choking.

“Ramirez,” Marcone pondered aloud. “Jog my memory?”

“A little younger than Dresden, prettyboy, Latino good looks. Talks about tits and ass waaaaaay too much to actually be interested in it. Any further in the closet and that boy would be in Narnia, if you catch my drift, and _I think you do_.”

“Ah. Then no, I don’t know Ramirez.”

“Then there’s McCoy. Oh man, with a name like that, I’m biting my tongue to keep from humming ‘Old MacDonald’ every time he walks into the room.”

“McCoy?”

“Yeah, he was Dresden’s mentor. Crotchety old guy, always looks like he’s about to bust into a rant about kids these days who need to get off his lawn.”

Marcone looked like he was trying hard not to laugh. “Ah, no. _Definitely_ haven’t had the pleasure.”

“Too bad. Because he’s the sort of pleasure you want to share, in much the same way that misery loves company.” Bob rocked back and forth a couple times, eye sockets doing a remarkable imitation of furrowed brows, then asked, “Have _you_ met any hot wardens?”

“Present company excepted?” I could feel Marcone’s eyes flick briefly to me. “No.”

“Any not-hot ones?”

“Attenborough,” Marcone supplied without missing a beat.

My head swung up. I’d been listening to their conversation with only half an ear as I sorted through the stuff Molly had brought from my lab, but now all my attention was fixed on Marcone, my pulse quickening, scarcely daring to believe that he’d _actually_ given us the name we needed, as easy as that.

“Oh, yeah, Attenborough,” Bob said vaguely, squinting like he was trying to see into the distant past. “I remember him, sort of. I don’t think he was anything to write home about.”

“No, I’d say he is not,” Marcone agreed with distaste.

My attention was now fully locked on them now, though I was afraid to say a word lest I disrupt whatever fragile stratagem Bob was spinning.

“Last I heard though, he was working in Europe,” Bob remarked carelessly. “When did you get to meet him?”

“Last Monday, when he walked into my office with a business proposition.”

“I see.” Bob’s eyes were gleaming ferociously now, like a predator closing in. “And tell me, did he then proceed to do something _unspeakable_ to you?”

Marcone was grinning crazily, as if he wanted to do nothing more than grab Bob and kiss him. “Mr. Dresden, I can’t say much for your encyclopedia’s sense of humor,” he said without looking at me, “but whatever you’re paying him, it’s not enough.” 

 

I sat back on my heels while that sank in. 

Attenborough. Or Attwhatsit, as I’d always called him. Huh.

I knew him by name, of course—the White Council is only so big—but not much more. As I recalled, he was part of the old guard, the guys who’d been around for so long that you half expected them to have sprung from the earth fully-formed, already sour-faced and judgmental. Our social circles didn’t exactly overlap, so I’d never actually spoken to him and couldn’t remember if I’d even heard him talk before.

“He pays me in porn, and the occasional shore leave,” I heard Bob say to Marcone, then Molly had leapt into the conversation and was now eagerly pelting Bob with questions to see how he’d managed it.

“It’s quite easy, actually,” Bob explained modestly. “He’s not allowed to talk about the silencing spell, nor is he allowed to answer if his partner is asking about the spell. But on a _different_ topic altogether—say, the relative hotness of wizards—there are virtually no restrictions.”

“But wait,” I interrupted, frowning. “It seems like the identity of the wizard who cast it should have been the spell’s most closely-guarded secret, and yet you got it out of him right away. Does that strike anyone else as a glaring oversight?”

Indeed, it had been easy. Or as TV dialogue would have it: _too_ easy. 

Bob shrugged. “Maybe, maybe not. It depends on what they wanted from him. When you’re laying a silencing spell, the goal is to strike a balance between strength and subtlety—half of their effectiveness is going unnoticed, because once they are, a skilled interrogator can wring a lot out of even the tightest ones. If Attenborough had banned Marcone from discussing him altogether, then it would be blindingly obvious as soon as Attenborough’s name came up in conversation and Marcone went suddenly and suspiciously mute. Either way, I would have gotten it out of him sooner or later.”

“So you can get any information like this?” Molly asked.

“Within limits. Because you have to come at the problem sideways, understand. I’m sure I can tease most anything out of him eventually, but I’m not going to do it with you there kibitzing.”

“Hmph,” I said, still dissatisfied. “Well, if you want privacy for your interrogations you’ll have to take it to the other room.”

Marcone tossed me an ironic salute and pushed himself to his feet. “Will do, Mr. Dresden.”

“Molly, while they’re busy with that, you and I are going to be cooking up enough assorted potions to feed a church picnic. It looks like we’ve got some good, old-fashioned detective legwork coming our way, and I can’t do that looking like me at the moment.”

Molly groaned. “Aww. You’re going to make me stir until my arm falls off.”

“Yup. Builds character. Oh and Bob, try to—”

“What’s that I hear?” Bob interrupted as Marcone hesitated over how to politely pick him up. “The buzz of a backseat driver giving directions to the professional?”

I waved them out, guiltily trying not to stare at Marcone’s ass. Those lounge pants were terribly flattering, and his t-shirt had ridden up an inch or so in the back to give a glimpse of skin. I had a sudden, vivid mental image of Bob cackling, _Hate to see him leave, but love to watch him go!_ I gave my head a brisk shake and turned back to the business at hand.

 

I really had been intending to go for the long haul and finish all the potions that we’d need in one epic session, but it wasn’t even nine o’clock before an early morning and the long day caught up with me hard. Molly and I had migrated to the kitchen and by that point we were working on a potion of my own devising that was something like a hallucinogenic Molotov cocktail, great for generating confusion in which to make one’s escape.

Nearly asleep on my feet, I made myself stick it out long enough to help her finish the batch we were on. Bottling up the finished product was a trial, using whatever collection of mismatched containers we could scrounge up from around the house. It didn’t help my sudden tiredness that—in the interests of creating more empty bottles, you understand—we’d split the better part of a six-pack that Veda had left in the fridge. They were now lined up on the shelf with new labels that read, among other things, NOT HEINEKEN.

Then I pulled mentor-prerogative and left her to clean up the mess in the kitchen while I dragged myself back up the stairs to my bedroom. I paused briefly outside Marcone’s door, powerfully curious about what information Bob had managed to tease out, in spite of my exhaustion. I could hear them talking still, though I couldn’t make out the words—mostly Bob’s clear voice, his inflection bobbing about (hah) as it tended to do, interspersed with Marcone’s deeper baritone. I pushed open the door quietly.

“—dude, that is _wicked!_ ” I heard Bob say, frankly admiring. “You’re like Al freaking Capone!”

“Except I don’t have syphilis,” Marcone said modestly.

“Thanks for sharing,” I put in.

Both of them looked up at my voice. Bob was on the desk and Marcone, comfortably propped up on the bed with his hands folded behind his head, gave me an amused smile when I entered.

“Dresden, did you know that your encyclopedia has tried every position in the Kama Sutra?” he remarked conversationally. 

I didn’t even want to know how they’d wound up on that topic. “So have you two been discussing anything _productive_ , or just swapping big fish stories?”

“Shoo Harry, this is very important business,” Bob said imperiously.

Marcone shrugged and gave me a look like, _I just do what the glowing talking skull tells me to do_.

It wasn’t hard to let myself be convinced to leave them to it. I went back to my room, not even bothering to change properly, just shucking off my shoes and jeans. I fell gratefully into bed, barely even getting under the covers before I dropped off to sleep.

 

When I awoke, it was pitch black and uncomfortably silent. Only the stark, glowing red digits of the alarm clock broke the unrelieved darkness, a floating 3:26. I was only half awake, so after establishing the time I was happy to let my eyes fall shut again. 

But I was no longer as overwhelmingly exhausted as I had been earlier, and this time it was harder to ignore how uncannily quiet the house was. I couldn’t tell you how it was different from my apartment, whether it was the lack of that distant, background hum of city noise or what, but the silence here was ringing. At 3:41 the clock died with a burst and a sizzle and I gave up and went in search of a glass of water or something.

I’d expected to find that the rest of the house had gone to bed too, but when I stepped out into the hallway I had to shield my eyes at the light and I could hear Molly’s high chatter muffled from behind one of the doors. The light was coming from Marcone’s room at the end of the hall, its door ajar. Squinting, I trudged down the hall and stuck my head inside, ready to demand to know why the hell he was still awake, only to find the overhead light on but the room itself empty.

“Marcone?” I called for good measure, my voice sounding rough and groggy. There was no reply.

I turned and instead followed the sound of Molly’s voice until I located the correct door. She was talking to someone else, possibly on the phone, since all I could hear was her delighted, scandalized laughter. I knocked on the door, which silenced her briefly, then she called, “Come in!”

I poked my head in cautiously to find my apprentice sprawled out on the floor on her stomach, hugging a pillow and looking up at me expectantly. Also, wearing nothing but a flimsy camisole and a pair of… something that I sincerely hoped was supposed to be underwear, not an acceptable substitute for pants. I opted for scrupulous eye contact.

“Heya Harry,” she said cheerily. “Sorry, were we being too loud?”

I glanced at the room’s other occupant, which was Bob, sitting on the desk and—unsurprisingly—looking terribly pleased with himself. He grinned broadly and, when Molly wasn’t looking, winked.

“No, I just got up for a glass of water. Is he corrupting you?”

“Hey now, it’s only corrupting _minors_ that’s a crime,” Bob protested, causing Molly to giggle. “She’s legal by any of your arbitrary American standards.”

“She can’t rent a car yet,” I countered.

“Oh, she can rent _my car_ any day,” he said with a leer.

I scrunched my eyes and rubbed at my forehead. “Bob, that doesn’t even—never mind. Do you know where Marcone is?”

Molly sobered slightly. “Downstairs. He said he couldn’t sleep.”

Ah, yes. Insomnia, another common side effect of silencing spells. “Okay, well—carry on, then. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”

“Did you know that Dresden once told me about this time when he was the wizard filling in a spirit-of-air-and-intellect sandwich…?” Bob blithely lied as I closed the door on them and continued down the hallway.

At the top of the stairs I could see blue flickers from the TV playing on the darkened walls of the living room, the volume lowered to a barely-audible murmur. I walked quietly on the stairs, but a few of the steps creaked when I put my weight on them and Marcone heard me coming. He lay stretched out along the length of the couch, head on the armrest and his hand with the remote resting on his stomach. He couldn’t have been paying much attention to the TV, because it was nearly too low to hear, but when he saw it was me he muted it the rest of the way and then laid the remote down on the coffee table.

“Almost four in the morning and no one in this house is asleep,” I grumbled, scrubbing at the crustiness around my eyes again.

“Well, I can’t speak for the others, but I seem to have lost the knack of a getting a good night’s rest recently.” He made a vague gesture and added dryly, “You’re more than welcome to join me for the anthropological novelty that is late-night TV.” 

I looked at the silent television set, where a rugged leading man with seventies-style hair was lugging a gun around a dusty desert town and squinting manfully into the sun. It was no doubt terribly famous and I probably would have had my American citizenship revoked for not recognizing it, but such is the life of a wizard.

I shrugged. “Sure, why not? Shove over.”

Rather than either sitting up or moving his feet, Marcone pushed himself halfway upright, with the obvious intention of lying back down again after I’d seated myself where his head had been. I hesitated briefly, then decided that tiredness was a sufficient chastity belt and consented to sit in the space he’d made for me. A moment later he was settling his head onto my lap and turning to face the TV again.

That left me with a minor dilemma over what to do with my hands, since now I didn’t have room in my lap, but I didn’t want to take the liberty of putting my hands on him. Or rather, I wasn’t ready to give _him_ the green light to put his hands on me. I ended up folding one of them in my lap, where it lay pressed against his shoulder, and the other I gave in and rested on his head.

I sat there in silence for a few minutes, not speaking because I didn’t know what to say, and hardly moving because I was acutely aware that Marcone could feel every move I made. After a while though, the semi-darkness and the soothing flickers of the TV started to do their work, drowsiness taking the hard edges off my self-consciousness, and I relaxed. I moved my hand to drift aimlessly over his hair, emboldened when he let it pass without comment.

My eyes came to rest on his profile, illuminated by the soft, colored light of the television, shadows sculpting his features and darkening the lashes that framed his eyes. He looked exhausted, but when I smoothed the hair back from his brow, a smile ghosted across his lips.

He really was unfairly handsome. I’d had that thought that many times before but now, with him so close, it struck me full force, accompanied by a surge of jumbled, inchoate _wanting_ that caught in my throat and tasted like bitterness.

Because there was no happily-ever-after to be had here.

I’d always known that he was good-looking. I’d always been more than halfway aware of the prickly sexual tension that ran beneath the surface between us, the subtle flirtation that fueled the verbal sniping and the public posturing but always conspired to put us at each other’s backs when push came to shove.

I’d never been oblivious to any of that, but this was _me_ and this was _Marcone_ we were talking about; I could understand each of us sold separately, but trying to make us fit together left me baffled, like pieces that weren’t even from the same puzzle. There was no way I could be interested in criminal scum like him. There was no way that _he_ could be interested in a scruffy, knight-errant wizard like me. And no matter what chemistry or simple loneliness might have us believe otherwise, there was no future for the two of us.

Marcone shifted in my lap, rolling his shoulders as if they were stiff, though he was careful not to dislodge my hand. “You don’t have to stay up on my account, you know,” he offered around a small yawn. He didn’t sound like he wanted me gone, just felt obliged to give me the option. “I’ll get to asleep eventually.”

“I don’t mind.”

Marcone turned his head to look up at me, his gaze clear and perceptive. “This wasn’t your fault, Harry,” he said.

He really could see right through me sometimes. I snorted. “No, but I’m still sorry that you got dragged into this.”

“If anything, I believe I’m the one who dragged _you_ into it.”

“Still, though…” I gave a frustrated gesture with the hand that I wasn’t using to pet his head. “It’s not fair that Attenborough did this to you. It’s a supernatural conflict; you’re an ordinary human. He should have left you alone.”

“Ah.” Marcone closed his eyes peaceably. “Well, the world isn’t fair. I reconciled myself to that a long time ago.”

That made me smile, though it was somewhat pained. “I still haven’t.”

He reached up to take my hand where it rested by his shoulder, lacing his fingers through mine and opening his eyes to settle on my face again. “I know,” he said quietly. His gaze was direct and disarmingly candid. “And I hope you never do.” 

It was really hard to meet the intensity of his eyes while every instinct was urging me to duck my head and glance away, but I forced myself not to. I wasn’t some awkward, blushing teenager; I was an awkward, blushing _adult_ , thank you very much. 

Abruptly he smiled at me, tired and a little unfocused, as though lack of sleep was wearing away at his usual self-possession. “I would kiss you now,” he said candidly. “Except it would be terribly awkward from this angle.” 

I felt the smile on my own face fade, and saw it reflected on his. “It’s probably best if we don’t,” I said, dropping my eyes and smoothing my fingers over his brow in apology.

“Your protection from the White Court?” he asked in all seriousness.

“Yeah.” Then honesty or tiredness loosened my tongue and I quietly admitted, “Though I’m almost tempted to go for it anyway.”

“Well, in that case, I’m almost flattered.”

I smiled and chucked him on the jaw. “None of your backtalk.”

His attention was diverted briefly by the TV, and then his eyes returned to me, serious again. “You never did answer me though,” he said. “About what the limitations on that are.”

I considered my answer. “I don’t know, exactly,” I told him after a silence. “It’s not like anyone’s been able to put it up to rigorous scientific testing.”

I was _this close_ to saying more, to admitting my hunch about it being localized around the lips, but we both knew that doing so would be... consent. Implicit permission to do everything up to that point. Which I knew I shouldn’t give him, so I bit my tongue and left it at that. 

You’re being virtuous, Harry, I told myself. Not sleeping with the enemy.

Being virtuous sucked. 

Marcone’s eyes slid off me and he sighed almost imperceptibly, a sigh that I couldn’t hear but felt as his lungs swelled briefly. He let go of me and settled both his hands on his stomach, lacing his fingers together to hold them there and then letting his eyes flicker closed again. 

“Ah well,” he said lightly, only a touch of regret in his voice. “It is a powerful advantage. I understand why you’re loath to risk losing it.”

He hadn’t otherwise moved, his head was still lying in my lap, but something in the air had changed. Abruptly I realized that he was _giving up_. He was backing down. Admitting defeat. Throwing in the towel.

Though really, why shouldn’t he? What incentive did he have to keep throwing himself at me, at this point? As far as he was concerned, he had made his interest plain and I had made my choice—I’d made it clear that my defense against the White Court was more important to me than the possibility of a… thing, with him. I may have had a good reason, but that didn’t make it any less of a refusal and he had more dignity than to keep chasing after me.

And if I didn’t say something now, this _would_ _be_ the end of it—I was quite certain of that. Marcone would let it go, wouldn’t hold a grudge, would probably never even allude to it again, for that matter. Our one-time date would pass into memory and we would go back to what we had always been, intermittent allies with a spark of unacknowledged attraction between us.

 _It’s for the best_ , I insisted silently, trying to ignore the sick, leaden sensation closing like a vise around my chest. _It never would have worked anyway. He’s a crime lord. You’re doing your best to stay one of the good guys. You would have been forced to end it sooner or later—b_ _etter that it never even began._

I looked at him. At his handsome, tired profile and the lines in his face set deeper than usual due to recent strain. At one of the few people in the world who could meet my eyes without flinching, someone who understood me right to my core, who knew everything that I was and  accepted it. Who believed in loyalty as much as I did and would be just as loyal to me, given half a chance. Who, I could admit it now, had become a friend. 

The silence stretched and thinned. The words were on the tip of my tongue, but saying them would change everything, and I didn’t know what the world would look like afterward. 

Then, as clearly as if it had been spoken aloud, I thought, _What are you waiting for, Harry?_

I didn’t have an answer to that. Only that there had been no one since Susan, and I had been waiting a very, very long time. Maybe so long that I didn’t know what to expect anymore. 

_How long do you intend to be alone?_

After she left, the weeks had blurred into months had blurred into years, until I got used to being alone, couldn’t remember being anything else. And each day made it easier to be alone, and harder to take that leap with someone new. 

_What will it take before you let yourself love again?_

I drew in a breath and wet my lips. “The mouth,” I said quietly. 

Marcone cracked an eye but didn’t turn his head. 

“I expect it has to do with the mouth. I mean, I don’t know for certain, but if I had to make a guess, that’d be it. It’s hugely symbolic—we use our mouths for eating, talking, kissing, breathing, blowing up balloon animals, you name it. Some cultures believe that it’s through the mouth that the soul enters the body. It stands to reason that it would be the focal point for this sort of magic.”

He was watching me curiously now, head tilted slightly and brows drawn almost imperceptibly as he studied my face, his own unreadable. Without changing expression he lifted his hand to lay his fingertips against my cheek, letting them slide down to trace along my jaw and then dip beneath the curve of my lip, flirting with it but not touching it.

He looked at me, his eyes dark in this light, and the heat, the _potential_ in his gaze was back. “That does seem to leave us with a number of other options.”

I drew in a shallow breath, my fingers closing around a handful of his hair. My heart was pounding in my chest, so loud that he must have been able to hear it, but in that moment the regret I’d been expecting didn’t materialize.

I swallowed. “Yeah, it does.”

Keeping his eyes on mine and moving slowly, as though giving me every opportunity to stop him, Marcone pushed himself upright and then turned in his seat to look at me straight on. He lifted his arm and settled it on my shoulder, his hand resting on the back of my neck and his fingers stroking lightly over my hair.

I shivered and bowed my head to rest it on his shoulder, still halfway unable to believe that I was doing this, that I was being allowed to. My hands came to rest on his waist and I felt his hitch of breath, the way his muscles shifted and tightened beneath his t-shirt.

“I’ve kind of wanted to do this for a while now,” I confessed. With my eyes closed, the awareness of him overwhelmed me.

He chuckled and moved his hand to tilt up my chin, his lips finding the line of my jaw. “I know,” he said, quietly pleased with himself. “So have I.”

And this time, I didn’t try to stop him.

I could remember having been worried about my lack of experience with men, but in the end it didn’t matter. There’s a point where instinct takes over; it had happened before with Elaine and it happened now with Marcone. I didn’t need a manual to know where I wanted to touch, what curves of muscle I’d wanted to run my fingers along. And it wasn’t so different anyway—it was all being _with_ someone, when for so long there had been no one. 

My touches were tentative at first, cautious forays int o forgotten terr itory, but as soon as I remembered, I couldn’t get enough. I felt like I’d been starving for so long that I’d forgotten the taste of food, like a drowning man who’d forgotten how to breathe, except now it was all coming back to me and I was ravenous. Running my hands over his body, feeling the weight of him, solid and  _real_ beneath his shirt, was unlocking memories that I’d buried long ago to save myself from drowning in grief, and with the first touch of skin, soft and hot and foreign, they poured over me like a flood.

It had been years since I’d had anyone. I realized , with a shock so acute it was almost a physical blow, that I had been so lonely for so long I’d forgotten there was another way to be. 

There had been no one since Susan, no one until Marcone—brilliant, infinitely patient Marcone—had worked his way past my defenses, gotten inside my skin somehow. Even now I didn’t understand it; unbelieving, the way that I’d always felt with Susan—struck dumb with wonder that someone like this, so beautiful and clever and extraordinary in so many ways, saw anything worthwhile in someone like me.

Yet he must have, because he laid hungry, open-mouthed kisses over my neck and shoulders like he never wanted to stop, his hands roving like he would memorize the feel of me. There were no words spoken; there didn’t need to be. And when I came it was almost an afterthought, already overwhelmed with feeling as I was. It was one long, unbroken moment in which nothing existed in the world except the two of us, and it was all that I wanted.

Afterward, it was a long time before we spoke. We lay on the sofa wrapped around each other, bodies cooling and heartbeats gradually slowing, delaying the inevitable moment when we would be forced to acknowledge that neither of us were young enough anymore to spend the night on a couch and not feel it the next day. That maybe there wouldn’t be another perfect storm like tonight had been, and that maybe when we got up that would be the end of it. 

I lay tucked behind Marcone, beneath a fluffy blanket I’d dragged over us for warmth and modesty. The TV was still going, flickering its incomprehensible images in silence. Under my arm, Marcone’s breathing had settled and I wondered if he had fallen asleep. I was starting to feel sleep tugging at my eyelids too, until it was an effort to stay awake. 

“So,” I said at length, my voice vague and rough with tiredness. “We probably shouldn’t fall asleep here. I’ll have a crick in my neck for days, and it’ll be all your fault.”

“Not to mention scandalizing Miss Carpenter,” Marcone agreed around a yawn, but neither of us moved. The silence stretched for a while and then Marcone asked, in a very different tone, “Is this likely to be the last time that I talk you into bed?”

He sounded far more sober and awake than I was, and I found myself blinking to clear my head. “If I said yes, would you—”

“Stay here until I get a backache. Yes.”

I swallowed, and felt my hand tighten around his. “Marcone...” _I want to._ “I—” I didn’t know how to say everything that my mind was full of. That I’d enjoyed it, more than enjoyed it, that I was glad we had, but I didn’t know if I would be once life kicked in again. “I would—I mean, I don’t want this to be the last time. But when all this is over and things go back to normal, we’re going to be on opposite sides again. I can’t make any promises... are you _laughing_ at me? ”

Yes. He was.

“Christ, Harry, I wasn’t proposing,” he snickered. He lifted my hand to his lips to sneak a quick kiss to the back of my knuckles. “I was asking whether I’d get another shot at your ass, possibly with a modicum of preparation next time.”

“Oh.” I felt the knot in my chest loosen. “Well then, uhm... my sources say yes?”

“Excellent.” Marcone gave my hand one last pat where it rested on his stomach and then pushed himself upright, rolling his shoulders stiffly. “In that case, I believe I’ll be heading to bed. I just might be able to manage some sleep now, and my sincere thanks to you for your hand in the matter.”

I groaned, moving my arm to cover my eyes. “Oh no. No bad puns, it’s too early for that.”

Marcone laughed, stretching his shoulders until they popped, and was on the verge of rising when he stopped. 

“Harry,” he said softly. I lowered my arm to meet his gaze, which had grown serious again. “I know we’re never going to see entirely eye-to-eye. But whatever happens, even if this... liaison ultimately doesn’t last, I know that you won’t use it as leverage on me, and I want you to know that I would never use it against you either. I will _never_ give you reason to regret having trusted me.”

“Pfft, who said anything about trusting you?” I retorted, making a half-hearted flick at him.

His knowing smile said that I wasn’t fooling anyone, but he let it pass. He laid his hand briefly on my head and ran his fingers through my hair before standing up.

“Goodnight, Harry.”

I considered lodging my usual complaint, then decided it was the least of the liberties he’d taken with me this evening. So if he was calling me Harry, and I was letting him, then did that mean I should be unironically calling him John now?

Yeeeeah, that would be a long time coming.

“Goodnight, Marcone,” I called.

I listened to the sound of his fading footsteps on the stairs, then rolled over onto my back and closed my eyes, feeling slightly embarrassed for the silly, happy smile spreading across my face, but helpless to stop it.

“Oh my god,” I muttered, putting my hands over my face and rubbing at my eyes. “You are _crazy_ , Harry, and probably sort of stupid to boot.”

Because there was no way this wouldn’t end badly, but even that certain knowledge couldn’t pierce the bubble of elation around me—I was just honestly and uncomplicatedly _happy_. Happy with the memory of Marcone’s arms around me, his lips on my skin, the wry affection and the promise in the last smile he’d given me. Happy with how it had felt to _hold someone_ again, another person, another life wrapped up with mine. 

Eventually I swung my feet off the couch, found my trousers under the coffee table and pulled them on over my boxers, then turned off the TV and felt my way upstairs in the dark. The light from under Molly’s door was out now and the hallway was quiet. I found my room by touch, flipped the light on and squinted through the sudden brightness to make sure I had the right room, then padded across to the bed.

I’d thought I was alone until I heard a long, low whistle, followed by Bob’s unmistakable chortle. “Oh ho. Oh ho ho ho. Hot damn, and here I was starting to think that you’d never get around to it. Well done, boss.”

“Oh shut up,” I muttered without heat. I was still far too happy to muster up any real annoyance. “Weren’t you in Molly’s room?”

He leered. “I was. She kicked me out when she wanted to sleep, even though I promised all I’d do was watch.”

“Color me shocked.” I was digging through the bag that Molly had brought, wondering whether she’d thought to pack any extra underwear for me.

“Well go on, you can’t stop there!” Bob insisted gleefully. “I want to hear about it! This is _news_ —stop the presses, omit no details, Harry got laid!”

“Forget it. I am not holding my sex life up for your critique.”

“Did you top or did he? Or did you take turns? You don’t seem to be walking funny, so I’m guessing you did, which, frankly, is a little surprising since he seems totally butch. An outright tiger in the sack, if you—”

“ _Bob._ ” I still hadn’t found my underwear but I’d come across a mallet, which I now brandished threateningly.

“Guess you decided it was worth your White Court protection to tap that ass, huh? Trust me, man, I’m _right_ there with you. I mean, you gotta live a little, right? You can’t always be worrying about—”

“Wait, what?” I interrupted, catching up with him a beat late.

“What?”

“About losing my White Court protection. I didn’t. I mean, I don’t think I did. Because we didn’t, uhm... y’know. Yeah.”

Bob rocked the skull in a quick one-two. “Uhhh, boss? Are you telling me you didn’t _realize_ that getting it on with Marcone was going to blow that for you?” 

Subtext: _can you possibly be as stupid as you look?_

“Well, I mean, I knew that we couldn’t actually... or I suspected that—say, what exactly trips it, anyway?”

Bob heaved a massive sigh and then tipped the skull forward to faceplant on the desk. “Harry. Harry. _Harry_.” He punctuated each time with a thump of his forehead against the wood. “You of all people should know that it doesn’t make a damn bit of difference _what_ you do, but _how_ you do it. If you’d been lying back and thinking of England, then the enchantment could have held up through the raunchiest triple-X shenanigans in Hustler—but boss, let’s be honest, you don’t get an afterglow like that from thinking about England.”

“Ah,” I said cogently.

“Hope it was worth it.”

I was silent while I absorbed that. I felt an echo of regret, yes, but it came without any real surprise. I had known this would happen, sooner or later. And suddenly something crystallized—this wasn’t about the White Court, and it never had been. It was about Susan. Because as long as the memory of her kiss protected me, I’d had _proof—_ proof that she had lived and she had loved me. It was all I had left of her. 

Oh, _Susan_.

It still hurt to think about her. In some ways it might have been simpler, easier even, if she had just died. Then, at least, I would have known what to do. Not like this, how I hadn’t even been able to grieve properly because she wasn’t truly gone, just lost to me. How I had woken every morning for _years_ with the cruel, foolish hope I could never quite extinguish, because it was always _possible,_ _damn it_ , that she might choose _this day_ to come back to me. She still loved me, I knew she did, and I loved her and surely we could find a way to make it work, right?

I hadn’t moved on after her, hadn’t found someone else, because I hadn’t _wanted_ to. Ours was the sort of love that’s supposed to last until the end of time, until the mountains crumbled and the stars fell into the sea, or at the very least, until one of us died. When that hadn’t happened, I’d found myself at a loss. How do you just _let go_ of love like that? How can you possibly walk away from that and expect to fall in love again, without cheapening everything that you had?

But she hadn’t died. She wasn’t coming back to me, but she was still out there somewhere, still alive, and I would never, ever stop being grateful for that, no matter how much harder it made everything else. Even now, when it couldn’t help feeling like a betrayal to finally let go of all that grief. 

“I think it was,” I said quietly, revelation moving over me soft and unsurprising, like dawn. “Or it will be.”

I stood and walked out again, following the hallway down to Marcone’s room. Inside, the large picture window was turning gray with the coming daylight. Marcone, motionless in the middle of the great bed, didn’t stir as I entered and came to sit down on the edge of the mattress.

“Marcone,” I whispered, putting my hand on his shoulder, warm beneath the soft cotton of his t-shirt.

He rolled halfway over and squinted at me, his dark hair endearingly disheveled. “Dresden,” he muttered, scrubbing at his face, more than half asleep. “Did you get lost?”

“There’s something I forgot to do.” And ignoring his unintelligible reply, I leaned over and kissed him, the way I’d been wanting to.

It was drowsy and soft, lacking the urgency from earlier—and quietly, understatedly perfect. Not without sadness, because with this, I _was_ letting go of Susan. Putting the period on the last sentence of my story with her, closing the book and placing it on the shelf, nothing more to be added.

But as that story was coming to an end, another one was just beginning—one of Marcone, of an unexpected phone call and a horse-drawn carriage and any number of unforeseen events that had culminated in this, me kissing him in the predawn gray and wondering why I hadn’t done this years ago.

When I broke away he was watching me, his eyes inscrutable. “Your White Court protection?” he asked, more lucidly than I’d expected.

“Gone.” I pulled a regretful face and shrugged, then added archly, “Which means that if I’m going to lose my protective enchantments for the likes of you, you’d better make it worth my while. I’ll be annoyed if this turns out to be a one night stand.”

“I think this will be over when you end it,” Marcone murmured sleepily, an unexpectedly candid admission that I seriously doubted he would have made while awake. “Now shut up and go to sleep.”

He backed up that order by hooking an arm over my neck and dragging me down onto the bed next to him. I was going to protest, but he’d already closed his eyes again and didn’t look as if he would hear me. My eyes were drifting shut before I was even aware that I’d given in, with Marcone’s solid warmth beside me as morning crept in at the window.


	7. Chapter 7

By the time I woke up the next day, morning had all but come and gone. High sunshine streamed in through the cheery, peach-colored curtains to light up the whole room, which left me momentarily disoriented since I’m used to sleeping in a cave. I did a quick mental checklist of the day before – oh right, the safehouse – except this wasn’t even my room – because – _holy shit, I had sex with Marcone last night._

Marcone. And me. On a couch. Me and Marcone. 

This might be an opportune time for a panic attack. 

I had a reasonably clear memory of the past evening’s sequence of events, blurred only slightly through the lens of sleep deprivation, but it all seemed impossibly far-removed. I could recall the hushed atmosphere, of intimacy and making crazy leaps of faith, and while I didn’t exactly regret what I’d done, I could safely say that it never would have happened in the harsh light of day. 

Because what had I signed myself  up for? I was starting to feel genuinely queasy, the butterflies in my stomach starting up an impromptu ballet. While I liked the man, maybe kind of a lot—and _I_ had been the one to say that I wanted more than a one-night stand, wait what?—the implications of a... thing with Marcone were _manifold_ , and a whole lot more staggering when they were suddenly no longer hypothetical. 

There were, beyond a doubt, Things We Needed to Talk About—only that would have to wait, because he had apparently decided that discretion was the better part of valor and snuck off before I woke up. Wuss. 

I rolled over to look at the bedside clock, which read 11:51. Quick mental arithmetic informed me that I’d gotten scarcely better than five hours of sleep, but just as quickly I decided that would have to be good enough. We had a big day ahead of us. And I had no idea what I was going to say to Marcone when I saw him, or what he was likely to say to me. 

The better part of valor was looking pretty good right about now. 

I was still fully clothed so I felt safe venturing into the hallway. I had my excuses ready, should Molly happen to see me sneaking out of Marcone’s bedroom, but there was no one around. Instead I could smell food, and so despite my apprehensions I ended up making a beeline downstairs like I had a hook attached to my stomach. 

From the top of the stairs I could hear voices, Marcone’s and Molly’s, with the slightly hollow, echoing tinge that told me they were in the kitchen. I entered to find them both still in pajamas, Molly at the stove tending French toast sizzling in the frying pan while Marcone slouched against the counter in a way that was seriously distracting with how it made the t-shirt pull tight across his trim hips. 

He looked up when I came in, his eyes finding mine unerringly, and a small smile that was warm and private and maybe a little mischievous. He certainly didn’t seem to be having any morning-after panic. 

Me and Marcone. Maybe it wasn’t such a crazy idea after all. 

“Well, look who’s up at the crack of noon,” Molly remarked dryly. I just barely managed to wipe the smile off my own face before she glanced up at me from the pan. 

To cover it, I sniffed the air and ambled over to peer over her shoulder, which also happened to bring me within arm’s length of Marcone. 

“Smells delicious,” I said, then added, just because I knew it would irritate her, “Clearly the kitchen is the best place for you.”

“I’d hit you with this spatula, but then it would get dandruff on it,” she informed me.

“Hey now—”

“And besides, Marcone’s the one who made the omelets. Why don’t you give _him_ lip about belonging in the kitchen?”

“Yes, why don’t you?” Marcone asked, looking highly entertained. “I’d love to hear it.”

“Actually, I think I’ll withdraw that comment,” I wisely decided. “And declare that anyone who makes me breakfast is my best friend forever and ever—and Molly, what on earth are you _wearing?_ ”

She glanced down unconcernedly at her cleavage. “What?” 

“You’re indecent!”

“It’s a _camisole_ , Harry,” she said, rolling her eyes in patented teenager fashion. “You act like you’ve never seen me in one before.”

“Yeah, but—!” I gestured at Marcone, who was watching me like he knew exactly what I was doing. “He’s a stranger. A guest. Go put real clothes on.”

“It’s _fine_!”

“It’s scandalous. Upstairs, change, now.”

“Okay, _okay_ , whatever.” She heaved a massive sigh and flipped off the burner, transferring the toast to a plate. “I swear, you are _such_ a freak sometimes,” she grumbled, but dropped the spatula in the sink and obediently headed off to change.

The moment she was gone I was turning to Marcone and he was already reaching out to pull me toward him. Half a heartbeat later I had him backed up against the counter, my hands clasping his face as I kissed him with the enthusiasm born of pure hunger. 

He hooked a leg around mine, bringing me up against him tightly. 

I stifled a groan, my eyes shuddering closed and my hand sliding down his back. His thin t-shirt and light cotton sleep pants did little to disguise the feel of him, and there was nothing in my head except  _now, more,_ and  _yes._ I dragged my fingers across his waist, then rucked up his shirt to run my hand along the flat expanse of his stomach.

He broke away from the kiss, sucking in a short gasp when the tips of my fingers slid under his waistband, one that transmuted into a shaky laugh. “My god, good morning to you too, Harry,” he said breathlessly. 

I tightened my arms around him, feeling the smile on my face as I moved from his mouth to his jaw. “Morning. You should have stayed in bed,” I murmured, laying an open-mouthed kiss at the base of his throat and trying to resist the urge to bite. 

“Yes, well—ah.” He shivered and rocked his hips against me. “I thought I’d give you some privacy, in case you needed some time to get used to the idea.”

“Yeah,” I said briefly, between kisses. “Thought about having a panic attack. Didn’t seem worth it though. This is much better.”

“Indeed,” Marcone agreed fervently, pulling me back up for another kiss.

Then Molly’s voice reached us from the living room, and we leapt apart like we’d been burnt, Marcone turning back to busy himself at the stove and me quickly throwing open the pantry. 

“Okay, I changed!” she called, her voice rapidly drawing nearer. A moment later she reappeared in the kitchen, wearing a sweater with a much higher neckline and spreading her arms to await my approval. “Well? Is this decent enough not to offend your delicate sensibilities, Harry?”

I peeked out from the pantry. “Yeah, that’s fine.” 

“What are you looking for?”

“Uhh... maple syrup.”

“It’s on the counter.”

“Oh. Right.”

Molly came over and picked up a plate off the counter, then loaded it up with a piece of french toast and an omelet that had been sitting on a different burner, covered to keep the heat. She gave it to me and told me to sit, which I did, though I was delayed by the search to discover which drawer contained silverware, and they joined me soon after. 

For the first few minutes, no one spoke except for brief, ‘please-pass-the-salt’ exchanges. Molly’s french toast was amazing, a heart attack on a plate, drowned in butter and powdered sugar. And Marcone’s omelets weren’t bad either, though I was having a hard time wrapping my brain around the idea of a time when Gentleman John had had to make his own breakfasts. 

Marcone was the first one to initiate conversation. “So, what’s on the agenda for today?” he asked the table at large. 

I swallowed the bite I was on and wiped my mouth on the back of my hand. Classy, thy name is Dresden. “Well, I still need to talk to Bob to see what information he managed to get out of you last night. And from there, I guess we’ll play it by ear.” 

After breakfast we all trooped upstairs together, drawing the blinds and rousing a groggy Bob to tell us what he’d learned from Marcone. 

“Wake up, Boberan,” I called cheerfully, rapping on the skull as I passed him on my way to the bed. Marcone joined me, though he left a discreet distance between us, and Molly settled in the chair at the desk.

The lights in the skull flickered on. “Can it wait, boss?” he asked around a jaw-cracking yawn that was pure theatrics. “I was right in the middle of this fantastic dream about a six-armed—” 

“No, it can’t. Full report, ensign.”

“How did I know you’d say that?” he asked rhetorically, yawning again just to demonstrate how put-upon he was. “Well, before we begin, keep in mind that some of this may be wrong. This is all put together from my own guesswork—extremely clever guesswork, of course, and he’s indicated that my conjectures are largely correct, but I may not be batting quite a thousand.”

I frowned. “Okay. I suppose that’s the best we can ask for.” 

“Though I did figure out why Marcone was able to say his name—Attenborough didn’t put the muzzle on that because he didn’t realize that Marcone knew it.”

“How could he not realize?”

Bob did a little rocking spin, like a bowling pin thinking about falling over, which he’d taken to doing recently instead of rolling his eyes. “What, you thought our evil genius waltzed into Marcone’s office wearing a ‘HI MY NAME IS’ sticker? No, Marcone managed to catch him in a soulgaze. Figured out a few things that way.” 

I looked at Marcone, surprised and more than a little impressed . Even if I’d thought of that, I wasn’t sure if I would have been ballsy enough to try. But then, Marcone always had been good at keeping his wits about him in a crisis. 

“Well,” I said, ruffled. “Good on you.”

“Your boyfriend’s not as dumb as he is pretty, boss,” Bob piped up.

“He’s not my boyfriend.” That response was on autopilot now, but I didn’t think anyone was buying it anymore.

“Of course, whatever helps you sleep at night.” Bob accompanied that with a meaningful look to remind me just _where_ I had slept last night.

“Anyway! Moving on now,” I said with a brisk clap. “So, what’s Attenborough’s game?”

“Oh, that’s easy. Marcone doesn’t know.”

Well that was great. I should have known it would be too much to hope that Attenborough had gleefully spilled his master plan to Marcone, Bond-villain style. 

“He only met him the once, I think,” Bob explained. “Attenborough had scheduled an appointment, except Marcone was under the impression that it was an ordinary business deal, nothing supernatural. Only then Attenborough walked in with a demon at his side and immediately everyone blacked out—when Marcone came to, the silencing spell was already in place. I think Attenborough tested it to make sure that it was working properly, which is when Marcone managed the soulgaze, then Attenborough made him call the valkyrie and give her the next two weeks off so she’d be out of the way. She was suspicious, of course, but they have a codephrase in place for him to use if he’s been compromised and he didn’t give it. Couldn’t, obviously. After that, Attenborough left, but Marcone suspects that a couple of his people have been mind-controlled to keep an eye on him. Subsequent orders were relayed to him via Attenborough’s underlings.”

“What kind of orders?”

“Ah.” Bob rattled around on the table for a moment. “That’s the part you’re not going to like.”

“Bob, I don’t like _any_ of this.”

“Well, Attenborough couldn’t care less about Marcone’s criminal empire, except that it gives him some money to toss around. He’s been exploiting Marcone’s status as a free-holding lord to make some deals that can’t be traced back to him.”

“Wait, wait, rewind,” I interrupted. “So was he using a mind-control spell too? How was he getting Marcone to make these deals?”

“Uh…” Bob glanced at Marcone as if for permission. “It wasn’t mind control. More like blackmail, actually.” 

I glanced at Marcone incredulously. “Blackmail? _You?_ ” When no explanation was forthcoming, I turned my disbelieving stare back to Bob. “What on earth did Attenborough have that gave him leverage against _Marcone?_ ” 

Bob looked me squarely in the eye. “You, boss.” 

“I—that’s ridiculous,” I sputtered, feeling myself turn beet-red. We hadn’t even been… that was before… “That is the stupidest freaking thing I’ve ever heard!” I said, wheeling on Marcone. “You of all people should know that I don’t need protecting! I’m not some helpless civilian, I’m a grown man _and a wizard,_ I might add!”

“Harry—” Bob tried to interrupt, raising his voice over mine.

“If this was some stupid act of chivalry on your part—”

“I assure you, chivalry ranks extremely low on my list of priorities,” Marcone bit out.

“I can protect myself just fine, thanks, even against a wizard like Attenborough—” 

“ _Boss!_ ” Bob hollered, finally managing to get my attention. “He had a good reason for it.” 

I met Marcone’s eyes for one long, tense moment, then broke off and looked away. “Alright, let’s hear it then.” 

“Attenborough wasn’t threatening to go after you himself,” Bob explained patiently. “Knowing you, you’d at least be able to give him a run for his money if he tried to take you on directly. What he had was a file or something, with evidence that he seemed to think would bring the Wardens down on your ass fast enough to leave nothing but a wizard-shaped smear on the sidewalk.”

“Evidence of what?” I asked sharply, and yeah, guilty conscience, it probably wasn’t a good sign that my first reaction was to immediately catalog everything they might have found out about recently.

“I don’t know, I couldn’t get the details. Maybe it was legit, or maybe Attenborough was planning to frame you for something, but either way, he seemed to think that all he’d have to do was drop it on the right desk and other people would take care of the rest for him.”

Other people from my own team even, just to make the irony that much extra special. 

“So either way he wins,” I said with a sinking sense of comprehension. “Marcone says yes and he gets Marcone. Marcone says no and he gets to take me out, one fewer good guy that he has to worry about later.”

Bob nodded gravely. “And even if you managed to avoid being killed by the Wardens outright, you’d either be tied up in the White Council’s bureaucracy while you tried to prove your innocence, or on the lam and too busy dodging Wardens to save your own ass to notice what was happening with Marcone. Either way, you’re out of the picture and Marcone is down the one ally who might have been able to help him.” 

A tidy plan indeed. Then a thought occurred to me and I laughed. “Man, they must have thought he was one crazy bastard when he offed me himself. What I wouldn’t give to have been a fly on the wall when Attenborough got _that_ memo. But what exactly was he making Marcone do?” 

“Open negotiations with Winter,” Bob replied promptly. “I don’t know what Marcone was supposed to get from them, but his end of the bargain was to promise an unspecified future favor that the Winter Queen could call in at any unspecified later date.”

“Hell’s bells, you didn’t actually _agree_ to that, did you?” I asked, horrified.

Never mind if Marcone had been strong-armed into making the deal—the fae courts neither knew nor cared what compelled humans to strike a bargain, only that once they did, there was no taking it back. Attenborough would get Winter’s help for this endeavor, and Marcone would be left to pick up the check. A blank check, handed to the Queen of Winter, and if there was a more spectacular way to screw yourself over, it was probably illegal in red states. 

“He didn’t,” Bob supplied, much to my relief. “Though he would have had to soon. He managed to drag out the negotiations just long enough to set up his escape plan.”

“When you put yourself in jail,” I worked out slowly. “You weren’t trying to protect yourself from Attenborough. You were protecting your empire from _yourself._ ”

Marcone smiled thinly. “Being incarcerated does have a way of abruptly curtailing one’s influence.” 

I had to admit, it was very neatly done how Marcone had managed to take both of us off the playing field. Attenborough, regardless of whether he believed that either of us were actually dead, had to be gnashing his teeth in frustration to find us both suddenly out of his reach. And to think, this whole plan had hinged on… 

“What even made you think that I’d agree to go on that date with you? What would you have done if I’d said no?”

That possibility had obviously occurred to him, because he had his answer at the ready. 

“Well, I was counting on your curiosity to get the better of you, regardless of your preferences. And if you’d continued to refuse, I would have used the golem to fake someone else’s murder. Someone who would get your attention if I could manage it; Mr. Hendricks if I couldn’t. Though I admit, I would not have taken him out for dinner and a movie first.” I must have looked insultingly impressed, because he added with a touch of annoyance, “I didn’t get where I am today by failing to consider all possible options.”

“Where you are today is in a safehouse with a silencing spell around your neck, but I take your point. Anyway, go on, Bob.”

“Okay, well after that he had Marcone in freelancers. He couldn’t give me any names, but we’re talking hit men, con men, any number of supernatural lowlifes that you wouldn’t want to meet in a dark alley, and set them up on his payroll…”

“...so that when all this gets blown open, it’s Marcone’s name on the paychecks, not his,” I filled in, seeing where this was heading.

“Exactly. Now here’s the part where it gets a little vague, because this is the nitty-gritty of what Attenborough was using him for and the spell guards that a lot more closely. I couldn’t get details about what he was doing with those freelancers, but some of them were going to be used to foul up the deal with Winter. And I think some of them might have had something to do with Red Court vampires, but I couldn’t swear to that.”

I cursed under my breath. “Well he’s sticking his fingers in as many pies as he can manage. Does Marcone know where to find the bastard?” 

“I don’t think so. As I said, he got his orders through intermediaries.”

Of course, because that would have been too easy. “Okay. Then is there anything else I should know?” 

“Yes.”

I waited. Bob didn’t elaborate. “Well?” I snapped, rapidly losing my remaining patience. “Quit dragging out the suspense and tell me already.” 

“I can’t. I don’t know what it is. Marcone’s made it pretty clear that there’s something else I haven’t gotten to yet, but without some idea of what it’s about, I don’t know what questions to ask.”

“Oh for the love of Pete,” I muttered, feeling the beginnings of a headache coming on. Marcone patted my shoulder in what might have been camaraderie.

“If it helps, he doesn’t seem to think it’s so vitally important that you can’t proceed without it,” Bob offered.

“That’s nice, because it seems like we’ll have to.” I sighed, straightening and running my hand through my hair. “Anyway, you done good, Bob. I don’t know how you figured out half that stuff, but… yeah.”

Bob made a tipping motion like a shrug. “The spell on him wasn’t really all that restrictive. Subtle, yeah, but it actually gave him a fair amount of leeway—probably on purpose. See, the more control a spell tries to exert, the higher the odds that it’ll screw up in an extremely noticeable way—I’m guessing that the last thing Attenborough wanted was for someone to twig to the silencing spell on Marcone, so he was willing to take the chance and make it a little looser than he might have otherwise. He probably figured that even if Marcone did manage to tip someone off, they wouldn’t know what kind of questions could circumvent it.” He grinned. “Obviously, he wasn’t expecting Marcone to get debriefed by an expert.” 

“Well that’s one thing that’s gone right for us, at least. Anything else you want to share with the class?”

“Nope, I shook him down but good. Though if you want me to try again for more detail, I can give it another go.”

Marcone inclined his head. “If you would be so kind.” 

Great, so whatever he hadn’t managed to get across to Bob, he thought it was important enough to keep trying. 

We locked Bob in the closet—no pun intended, his request since he insisted the curtains didn’t keep enough light out—to get his beauty sleep and migrated back downstairs to the living room. I took a seat on the couch, Molly settling on the opposite end from me (causing me only a moment’s guilty panic that she might somehow intuit what antics had gone on here last night), and Marcone took the armchair. 

“Alright, bold leader, so what’s the plan?” Molly said.

Right, plans. Because I was _so_ good at those. 

I sighed, briefly glancing at Marcone just to confirm that, yup, he still couldn’t be any help. “I don’t know,” I admitted. “I guess I was hoping that Marcone would be able to give us an address so that we could just go charge the gates and be done with it.” 

“My apologies for not being more forthcoming,” Marcone said dryly.

Molly snorted. “Come on, Harry, where’s the challenge in that?” 

I mostly ignored both of them. “Anyway, I was thinking that since this lead has dried up, our best bet is to follow a different one—namely, one Jonathan Ailill Williams.” 

I recapped my meeting with Tabby, both what she’d told me and what I suspected about the matter, and then my phone call with Murphy, making a mental note to send Marcone upstairs to collect the faxed copy at some point. 

“...so even if we don’t know where Attenborough’s holed up, Williams is still out in the open,” I concluded. “He might know something.”

“And you think he’s going to be receptive to your interrogation?” Marcone asked flatly. He shook his head. “You have no idea what to expect from this man, since as I understand it, all you have by way of information is a rather garbled account from the man’s wife—”

“And you’re really stupid about women, Harry,” Molly put in helpfully.

Marcone gave a judicious nod. “Indeed, thank you for putting it so cogently, Miss Carpenter. I’ve gone through a lot of trouble to make both of us as safe as I could manage, and you would risk tipping our hand disastrously.” 

I waved acknowledgment of that point, but didn’t give in. “Perhaps, but what else do we have to go on? Attenborough could be anywhere in the world. We’re never going to find him without help.” 

“And you expect Mr. Williams to help?”

“Whether he wants to or not, yeah. The timing of all this is just too convenient—I find it really hard to believe that he has nothing to do with Attenborough.”

“All the more reason not to blow your cover. Do you really want him reporting back to his associates that you are not only alive, but in hot pursuit of him?”

“I know, I know.” Marcone was right—if Williams did that, and Attenborough discovered that we were after him, he would likely go to ground and then we really would never find him. And Marcone would have a silencing spell stuck on him for the rest of forever, or until he went crazy from lack of sleep.

I sighed. “Okay, there has to be an angle we’re missing here. I had Murphy fax me a copy of the info she dug up on Williams, it should be sitting in the machine upstairs. Marcone if you would...?” 

He pushed himself to his feet. “I’ll get it. I wouldn’t inflict you on an innocent fax machine.” 

He disappeared up the stairs and I turned my attention to Molly, who had leaned forward to get my attention. 

“I could be the one to question Williams,” she offered. “As part of your investigation, maybe. I could call his wife and tell her that I’m taking on your unfinished cases. You prep me beforehand with what you want me to ask him, I can take care of it.”

I considered that, trying not to dismiss it out of hand. I didn’t like that idea, but I couldn’t tell if I didn’t like it because it wasn’t a good idea, or because I was a control freak who wanted to do everything myself. 

“It wouldn’t help,” I decided at last. “The main problem is that we don’t want him to remember that anyone was sniffing around for this information in the first place.” An unpleasant thought occurred to me and I expelled a harsh breath, drumming my fingers on the table. “You know, this would be a lot easier if we were allowed to wipe his memory once we were finished.”

Molly just raised one pierced eyebrow at me and gave me her most unimpressed-teenager stare. I couldn’t blame her; she was already on a zero-strikes probation from the last time she’d inadvertently gone tampering with people’s heads, so White Council regs about mind control transgressions were no laughing matter for her. 

“Harry…” she began with reluctance, and I cut her off immediately.

“That was a bad joke, kiddo. We’re not even considering it, and I shouldn’t have even said it.”

“Mr. Dresden,” Marcone called down, and a warning note in his voice made me come to attention. I heard his footsteps on the stairs and he appeared a moment later, flipping through printouts and looking ominous.

“Apparently I was wrong,” he said evenly, dropping the top page in my lap as he passed the couch. “I have met your Jonathan Williams.”

“When?” I asked. I frowned and picked up the sheet he’d given me, a page with Williams’ driver’s license information and an austere DMV photo of a handsome, blank-faced man with his hair pulled back into an unseen ponytail. Nothing in it jumped out at me, so when Marcone didn’t answer I looked up at him, my mouth open to ask him again, then realized that he was _not answering._

“So he is working for Attenborough,” I guessed grimly. “Let me guess, he’s one of the lackeys who’s been passing you orders?”

Marcone’s lack of response said everything. 

I sighed, turning to look across the lake. “Well, that settles it then—I don’t think we have a choice. We _have_ to talk to him somehow, he’s our only way to get a foot in the door.” 

“But we can’t let him remember that we were asking,” Molly reiterated. “So you tell me, Harry—what other options do we have? Seriously, we have _magic_ at our disposal. Surely there’s some other way to interrogate him without it getting back to his boss.”

“I can think of a few other spells that would do the trick, but unfortunately they’re just as black as simply wiping his memory and a lot less foolproof.” I shook my head and scrubbed my hand over my hair, probably making it stick up like a hedgehog. “I’m drawing a blank. Maybe Bob would know something.”

“In essence, you want to be able to talk to him with the assurance that he won’t remember the encounter?” Marcone spoke up suddenly.

“Yeah, but the only magic to do that is bad, bad, _bad_ , not only for the victim but also for the wizard who casts it. That’s how you go dark side.” I made certain not to glance at Molly as I said that, not even by accident, as I struggled to explain. “It’s a... violation, on the most fundamental level, and it can cause a lifetime of mental trauma.”

“I wasn’t suggesting using magic.”

“Then what _were_ you suggesting?”

“I was thinking you could roofie him.”

I blinked at Marcone, expecting at any moment to realize that had been a well-deadpanned joke. He just stared at me, solemn and unsmiling, and oh _hell_ , he had actually meant it. 

“What—you can’t be serious,” I said with disbelief. “No way. Just... _no_.”

Marcone raised his eyebrows and made a small shrug. “I’m not going to force you, I’m only saying it’s an option you might want to consider,” he pointed out logically. “You need the information this man has, but you can’t suppress his memory with magic. I’m certain that I can acquire Rohypnol through some channel or another, with no chance of repercussions from the authorities. The low tech solution, so to speak, would seem to be our best option at this point.” 

He looked at me, then tossed a glance sideways to include Molly, as if inviting either one of us to produce a better idea. When she didn’t say anything, I burst out a sigh and pushed myself to my feet, pacing across the living room. 

“I can’t believe you’re even suggesting this. You’re talking about giving him _date rape drugs_.” 

“Not for their intended purpose.”

“That’s doesn’t even _matter!_ ” I said, wheeling on him. “It’s still date rape drugs and they’re still dangerous! I’m not going to deliberately risk inducing a drug overdose, or a... a bad reaction, or whatever.”

“Harry, you don’t have to if you don’t want to,” Marcone said patiently. “But if you’re going to object, you’re better off doing so on moral grounds, because logistically, it’s a sound plan. It’s not likely to hurt him, since the chance of an overdose is vanishingly small with the proper dosage, and furthermore, we would be keeping a close eye on his condition. In the unlikely event of a bad reaction, we could to get him to a hospital very quickly.” He gave me a pointed look. “And that’s to say nothing of the fact that wizards are notoriously more resilient than us mere mortals.”

Through all this, Molly had said nothing, but I could feel her eyes boring holes in me. I stole a quick glance at her, saw my own misgivings reflected tenfold in the set of her jaw and the closed-off look in her eyes. I  _knew_ she had justifiable issues with drug abuse, and her silence now was loaded with it.

Marcone watched our brief interplay, eyes flicking between us. “To put it bluntly, this is a calculated risk,” he concluded when I didn’t answer, folding his arms and sitting back. “If this were my call, I would be willing to take it, but under the circumstances, it will be your ethics that cast the deciding vote.” 

I stopped at the window, running my hand through my hair and drawing in another tight breath. Then I dropped my hand and beckoned curtly to Molly. “Okay. Molly and I need to powwow. In private. Marcone, you stay here and...” 

“Stay out of it?” he suggested when I came up short.

“Yes. Please.”

Molly drew in a deep breath and pushed herself up off the couch, though she didn’t meet my eyes as she walked past me and up the stairs. I was heading after her when Marcone stopped me. 

“Harry,” he called, not raising his voice, but not needing to. When I looked back, his face was somber and utterly unreadable. “I’m not married to this idea. If you have a better plan, I’d be glad to hear it.”

I felt my face tighten into a smile that never touched my eyes. “That’s just the problem—I don’t.” 

I found Molly upstairs in the bedroom that was nominally mine. She’d done an indifferent job of making the bed, just tossing the covers over it and then settling herself  cross-legged on top of the bedspread. 

“He’s right, you know,” she said abruptly. Her voice was a shade louder than it needed to be, like a challenge.

I glanced up from closing the door to give her a neutral look. “He often is. It’s not always one of his more endearing qualities.” 

“We do need the information.” Her face was hard and despite her words, she was a far cry from endorsing the idea. “And you know we could get away with it—the White Council doesn’t care about roofies, and it’s not like the police are going to catch us.”

“True, and true,” I acknowledged. I leveled a flat look at her. “But you and I both know that just because you _can_ get away with something doesn’t mean you ought to.”

At that, some of the tension in her abated, her anger slightly defused. She chewed over that while I came over to join her on the bed, pushing the pillows aside so I could take a seat and lean against the headboard. 

“Listen, Molly,” I began. “You don’t have to be involved in this if—”

“I already am,” she broke in, her eyes intense beneath the heavy kohl lining them. “I don’t like this idea, but if you think it’s necessary, then I’m sticking around to help. Like hell I’m leaving you here with only _Marcone_ to be your conscience. So—talk me round.”

“That’s going to be hard, since _I_ haven’t been talked into it yet. So let’s table that for the moment.” I took another breath and scrubbed my palms over my knees. “The other thing I wanted to talk to you about was Marcone. I wanted to clear the air, see how okay you were with... us.”

Molly’s eyes were fixed on the bedspread, and she tugged at one blue dreadlock before asking, “How long?” 

I didn’t even pretend not to understand. “Only since last night.” I waited until she lifted her head and then met her gaze squarely, letting her see that I was telling the truth. “I haven’t been keeping secrets from you, padawan. Not one like this, anyway.” 

She held my eyes for a moment, then seemed to accept it, nodding slightly. “That’s what I thought.” Her lips quirked into a wry half smile and mischief glinted briefly in her eyes. “You’re not as subtle as you like to think you are, Harry.” 

I snorted. “Tell me something I don’t know.” 

“It’s just... I don’t even know where to begin with that.” She shook her head, incredulous. “Seriously, _Marcone?_ Just... _how_? Last I checked, you hated his face, and now you’re—”

“I know, I _know_ ,” I sighed, putting up a hand to forestall her. “Truth be told, I wasn’t expecting it to happen either. And look, I understand why you don’t like him, and I’m the last person to tell you that you should. I haven’t forgotten what he’s done either, and—”

“Harry,” Molly cut me off, catching the hand that I’d been gesturing with and gently closing her fingers around mine to silence me. She gave a sardonic, distantly sad smile. “Did you come here to find out what I think, or tell me what you think?”

I blinked, then shrugged a little abashedly. “Both, I guess. You go first then.” 

“Okay.” She let go of my hand and folded hers in her lap again. “Well... it’s kind of complicated. Let me tell you a story.”

Her gaze wandered to the window, and she sat in silence for a moment, brows drawn, while she gathered her thoughts. 

“You remember last year, all the confusion after the showdown with the Denarians? When Dad was injured?” she asked at last, looking up.

This wasn’t what I’d been expecting, but I nodded soberly. How could I not? So many of my friends had been hurt there, and her father had nearly died. 

“When we were in the hospital… before we knew if Dad was going to be alright,” she began haltingly. “You know, because you were there, that Mom and I had been hanging around for hours waiting for him to get out of surgery. You’d gone off somewhere by the time they finally chased us away for dinner, so it was me and Mom, and she was being so—so _frustrating_. She just doesn’t _get it!_ And that was making me so angry. 

“I know I’m not being fair to her, because she was afraid for Dad too, same as I was, and we just had different ways of showing it, but… she doesn’t understand. The way she sees his work… it’s like she thinks this stuff happens _to_ him, and then she wants to blame you, or blame God, or whatever. She doesn’t understand that this is what _he chose_ to do. Throwing himself into danger, time and time again, it’s what he does. It’s what he _is_ —or what he was, anyway. But she doesn’t want to admit that, because… oh, I don’t know. It’s like she thinks he doesn’t love us enough. That because he’s willing to die for his cause, that means he doesn’t think we’re worth living for, or something. Which is bullshit, but sometimes I think that’s how she sees it. And I was this close to fucking _screaming_ at her, because I was scared too and she just didn’t get it.”

I didn’t see how this was leading up to anything with Marcone, but I kept silent. 

“Anyway, that’s not the point. The point is, I left her in the cafeteria and went off on my own before it turned into a serious fight. While I was wandering around I ran into that guy Kincaid, you know, Ivy’s bodyguard, and he asked me if I’d do him a favor. I didn’t know what he wanted, but I was exhausted and worried to pieces and desperate for something to take my mind off Dad, so I went with him. And he took me to Ivy’s room.

“I guess she wasn’t that bad off, not compared to some of the others, but it’s different, seeing bruises like that on a grown man versus seeing them on a little girl. She was being treated for hypothermia and exposure and”—Molly’s voice caught slightly—“sexual assault. She’d woken up with no one around but Kincaid, and I guess she wanted… well, _needed_ someone to talk to. Someone human, and Kincaid may be good protection but he’s not exactly a warm and cuddly kind of guy, so he went looking for someone who fit the bill, and found me.

“At the time I was freaking out because I was like, Wait, what? Gimme a break, I suck at dealing with other people’s kids! I don’t know how to talk to an ordinary ten-year-old, much less one who’d gone through an ordeal like that. The Denarians, they’d shaved off her hair, you know, and even though someone had managed to dig up one of those terrycloth hats for her, you know the ones they give chemo patients, that was almost worse because it made her look like one of those kids with cancer, the terminal ones who aren’t going to live to see their next birthday—and I’m rambling, I’ll shut up now, but seriously, Harry, that was the last place I wanted to be.

“Though it turned out, she was actually doing a pretty good job keeping it together. Really trying to, anyway. She asked about you—she wanted to know if you were okay, and I told that you were. Then she asked about Marcone, and frankly I didn’t give a rat’s ass about him, but obviously she did, so I muttered something about him being fine too, mostly because I didn’t feel like tracking him down to make certain.

“And—God, Harry! The _look_ on her face when I told her that Marcone was okay. She was so freaking… ‘relieved’ isn’t even the word for it, it was stronger than that. Like clouds breaking and fucking sunshine pouring in. Like everything was going to be alright in the world now that Marcone had survived too, and suddenly I felt like a total asshole because I’d gone and said that without actually knowing if he was alright.

“So I said something lame like, ‘So, he means a lot to you, huh?’ And she told me, entirely serious, ‘I couldn’t have made it without him.’ And then she started talking, just pouring out the whole damn story. She left out exactly what they did to her, but you could read between the lines and it wasn’t pretty. I think she needed to get it all out, to start making sense of it or something, to get some kind of handle on what had happened. She talked about the Denarians—freakish detail, Harry, stuff that no one should have to remember—all the different ones, what they looked like, how they acted, some of the things they’d threatened her with.

“And she talked about Marcone. Apparently he was in pretty rough shape even before she got there, but from the moment they dropped her there, he did everything he could to keep her spirits up. She said that when some of the Denarians started picking on her—her words, not mine—Marcone came to her defense, throwing taunts until he managed to piss them off enough to turn their attention to him instead. That’s how he lost that chunk of his ear, one them just tore it right off.

“But they couldn’t break him, of course, the stubborn bastard, and eventually they lost interest and left. So when he turned to Ivy and told her that, by God, they _would_ get out of this alive, she believed him. I don’t know if he believed it himself or if he just wanted to keep her from giving up, but his confidence was absolute, and catching. He told her that she had to be brave, and he knew she could be, that they both had to, so they’d be ready when their rescue came.

“So even after the Denarians threatened to cut his tongue out if he said another word to her, she could take comfort from knowing that she wasn’t alone there. Knowing that no matter how bad it was, someone there was on her side. And if Marcone, who was ‘just an ordinary guy,’ as she put it, had the strength to endure, then she, the Archive, surely could too, right?”

Molly broke off, biting her cheek absently. 

“I was stunned at the time,” she admitted frankly. “I mean, I could hardly believe we were talking about the same Marcone. And I didn’t want to be the one to tell her that her new hero was a killer and a drug dealer and god-knows-what-else, but she’s the freaking Archive, so hell, I guess she must have known. Instead I went and found a nurse and asked if we could go visit him.

“It was a pain in the ass getting through his security, and he was pretty heavily doped up when we did, but… it was worth it. Ivy didn’t even seem to notice how spaced out he was, she kept telling him, ‘You were right, you were right! You said we’d escape, and we did!’ And he could barely focus well enough to give her a pat on the head, but he said, and I remember this verbatim, _‘Because I know that Harry can always be counted on to ride to the rescue_.’”

She paused for a moment to let that sink in. 

“Then Ivy said, ‘I really like Harry,’ and Marcone told her—God’s honest truth—‘So do I.’ I am _not_ making this up. Like I said, he was stoned out of his mind. I doubt he even remembers it.

“But all at once it hit me, like a really late epiphany, that just like no one can be entirely good, maybe no one can be entirely evil either. Or maybe some people can, but Marcone wasn’t one of them. He’s still a ruthless bastard, don’t get me wrong, and he still has a hell of a lot to answer for. But the things he does, I think he does them because he truly believes that they’re necessary. And I…” She paused to draw in an unsteady breath, swallowing it and nodding. “I have some experience with that.”

“Molly,” I tried to protest. “You’re not—”

She lifted a sharp hand to cut me off. “No, let me finish. The thing is, Harry, that even when I first started, I knew that what I was doing was wrong. Seriously, how could it not be? I was screwing around with their _minds_ , for fuck’s sake. I didn’t have to know about the laws of magic to notice how incredibly off the reservation that was. I knew it was wrong and I did it anyway. Because I didn’t realize I could get caught. Because I thought the ends would justify the means.” 

Now that was starting to sound familiar. 

“I spent a lot of time thinking about that after my trial. God knows I wanted to blame someone else for it, to make excuses for myself, but when you got right down to it, _I’d done it._ With the best of intentions, yeah, and I still believe that counts for a lot, but in the end, what I had done was no one’s fault but mine. The same way that Rose and Nelson were responsible for _their_ own actions. And the way Marcone is responsible for his—but I’m not going to make him the scapegoat for everything that’s wrong with this world.”

In the heavy silence that followed, I struggled to find an adequate response. “Wow,” I said at last. “Grasshopper, I think you might finally qualify as a grown-up now.” 

“Screw you,” she said in a much lighter tone, socking me on the arm automatically. “Besides, you don’t get to snark. You’re supposed to be all grateful and shit that I’m so accepting of your lifestyle choices, or whatever.”

“I am grateful,” I said mildly, rubbing at the proto-bruise forming there.

“In any case,” she finished, huffing a sigh and planting her arms on the bed behind her, “I have mixed feelings about Marcone. I haven’t decided what I think of him yet, much less what I think of him-plus-you, but it’s not like I could tell you to stop seeing him even if I wanted to.”

“No, not directly, but you could make a strong case against him. And despite how it may seem sometimes, kiddo, I do care what you think. Your opinion is important to me.”

She’d been gazing out the window and she gave a brief smile at that, though it soon faded again. “Well, I suppose if I had a case to make about Marcone, that was it. That whatever else he is, he’s also a friend to pint-sized damsels in distress.” Her eyes flicked back to me and she raised one pierced brow, flashing me a cheeky grin. “Sound like anyone you know?” 

“Yeah, yeah, the two of us should start a club.” I drew in a deep breath, sitting up straighter and rubbing my palms over my knees. I found myself feeling much better, in spite of what was still in the offing. “Alright,” I said, more crisply. “So, what are we going to do about Williams?”

She shrugged, looking dubious. “You’re the boss, boss.” 

“Can I abdicate? This boss thing isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.”

“What, and make Marcone the boss? I think I’d rather take my chances with you.”

I sat back, tipping my head up to the ceiling. I was silent for a long moment, before at last deciding, “Well, I don’t like it. But I’m not seeing any better solution.” 

“You’re actually thinking about doing it.” She didn’t sound surprised.

“Yeah, I am. And I can’t even blame it on Marcone’s influence, because I don’t think this would be the worst thing that I’ve done. I’ve made some pretty questionable choices in the past, but I made them in the heat of the moment. This? This is premeditated, and I’m a hell of a lot less comfortable with it.”

Molly nodded. “And it’s drugs,” she finished, bringing us to the crux of the problem. “If it were about magic, you can’t even pretend you wouldn’t be looking for a loophole—I heard about your stunt with the T-rex.” She poked me in the ribs, with a brief smirk that faded just as quickly. “But it’s different when it’s drugs.” 

“Very different. And I’m not even sure it should be, but it feels different. So—what do you think?”

Molly spread her hands. “What can I tell you that you don’t already know, Harry? That it’s illegal, but we’re not going to get caught for it? That it’s immoral, but the kind you can probably justify? We have to find Attenborough before people start getting hurt, and Williams is our only link.” 

All on me then. Oh, the joys of leadership. 

I took a deep breath. “Alright.” Then again, slightly stronger, “Alright. Then I guess we’re in—I’ll go tell Marcone to make the call.” 

I swung my legs off the bed and climbed to my feet, stretching and feeling a little of that bone-deep stiffness that comes of running short on sleep. 

“Harry.” Her voice stopped me at the door.

I turned around to see her still sitting on the edge of the bed, head slightly tilted as she studied me intently. 

“What is it you like about him?” Not combative, just curious.

I considered and discarded two possible responses before settling on, “I don’t think it matters.” 

“Harry, if you’re going to be _dating_ him—”

“I’m not.”

She broke off, blinking. “You’re not? What was all that last night then?” 

I paused. “Making the most of the time we have.” 

“But... you do _like_ him, right?” Her tone indicated that if I was going to put everyone through this fuss, I had damned well better. “Tell me it’s not just because he’s hot.”

“Yes, but he’s still Marcone—I’m under no illusions about how long this is going to last once things go back to normal.”

“That’s...” She made an exasperated gesture, and huffed a short sound halfway between a laugh and a sigh. “You know, I can’t decide if that’s stupid, or tragic, or both.”

“And that’s life for you,” I said, closing the door behind me.


	8. Chapter 8

We were all downstairs again by the time the goods arrived, putting the finishing touches on our questionable plan and double-checking that we had all the equipment we’d need to subdue a moderately powerful wizard. 

The plan was a simple one. We had established through mundane channels that Jonathan was at work (running errands part-time for a supervillain apparently didn’t preclude the glamorous working-on-weekends lifestyle of a paralegal) and planned to stake out the front of Jonathan’s office until he emerged. At which point Molly, in disguise, would intercept him and start begging for help, babbling only semi-coherently that she’d heard he worked magic and she had no one else she could turn to. He didn’t even need to be a sucker for women in distress to make this work; he would probably be willing to go a short distance with her just to keep her from making a scene in front of his office, and that was all we needed. She’d lead him into a circle of entrapment that I would have ready; as soon as he was inside I’d activate it and _bam_ , he’d be stuck long enough for us to tase him or something. 

Simple, right? And so foolproof that something had to go wrong. 

We all went on high alert when a single human tripped the warning wards, and I made my way to the window, blasting rod in hand, to see who was out there. It was Hendricks, arriving alone, wearing sunglasses against the bright, crisp sky and climbing out of a diminutive Ford Focus like circus clowns piling out of a miniature car. A Mafia clown, since between his bulk and a massive aluminum briefcase that looked heavy enough to double as a battering ram, he couldn’t have screamed _mob enforcer!_ more effectively if he’d worn a sign. 

I let him into the house so he didn’t accidentally trip any of the defenses. He gave me the dubious look that I always seemed to earn from him, then favored me with one slow, precise nod before continuing into the house. Huh. Did that mean it had finally penetrated his thick skull that his boss and I were on the same team, and he could quit waving his gun at me? 

I followed him and found them in the dining room clustered around the table, the briefcase opened flat to display its contents. 

“—brought your Beretta just in case,” Hendricks was saying in his bass rumble as I joined them, carefully picking out a sleek black pistol and laying it heavily on the tabletop. “But you said you needed non-lethal force, so I grabbed everything else I could find. Don’t know how close you wanted to get to the target, so I brought the tasers you asked for, a dart gun, police baton, and some chloroform.”

Marcone picked up the dart gun and studied it with a critical eye. To me it looked like a toy, long and skinny with a barrel made of plastic. “This should do nicely, I think.” He turned to me, offering the butt-end of the gun. “Mr. Dresden? Careful, it’s loaded.” 

Molly shot me a look like, _Your boyfriend calls you_ _**Mr.** _ _?_ and then did that non-judgmental eyebrow thing again. 

“I’ll be carrying one taser, and I believe Miss Carpenter should have the other,” Marcone continued.

Hendricks grunted. “You ever used one of these before?” he asked Molly. 

She shook her head. 

He picked up an oddly-shaped, black plastic gun from the case and held it up for her to see. “Police issue X26 Taser,” he explained gruffly. “Shoots a little pair of darts connected to the gun on a wire. You can shoot someone from thirty-five feet, drops ’em even through clothes.” He put that back in the case and picked up an incongruously pink device that looked, at a glance, like an electric shaver. “Or the handheld kind. This, you gotta hold on them yourself, takes ’bout five seconds which is a long f—freaking time in a fight. Best place to get ’em is on the shoulder, under the ribs, or on the hip,” he said, pointing the proper spots out on himself. 

Huh. I guess I should have known that Hendricks couldn’t be as stupid as he looked, or he wouldn’t have found his way to becoming Marcone’s top enforcer. He obviously knew his stuff, now assembling a gun with military efficiency, and I wondered what he’d done before he ended up in Marcone’s employ. 

Molly had listened to his short lecture carefully, and now gave a serious nod. “Alright.” She looked solemn and martial; not for the first time, it occurred to me that she was going to be _formidable_ once she’d come into her own. 

“Alright team, we ready to move out?” I asked, trying not to feel silly as I tucked the feather-light dart gun inside my coat where I was more used to keeping a .44.

“As ready as we’re going to get, I expect,” Marcone replied.

“You got the Kool-Aid, Grasshopper?”

“Aye, captain.” Molly went to the fridge and returned with three bottles of NOT HEINEKEN, the disguise potion variety, passing one each to myself and Marcone.

Marcone unwrapped the rubber-banded cellophane that was covering the top, and sniffed the disguise potion fastidiously, nose wrinkling in distaste. “Your homebrew leaves something to be desired,” he remarked. 

“Bottoms up,” I offered, raising mine like a toast.

“To foolhardy plans,” Marcone agreed, clinking his bottle against mine.

“To chloroform,” Molly added. “Because that makes all foolhardy plans better.”

I couldn’t think of anything to add, so I just tipped the bottle back and chugged. 

 

An hour and twenty minutes later, we were in position. The disguise potion’s effects, which are more or less random unless you make an effort to control them, had turned Molly into a mid-twenties brunette of average attractiveness (though it couldn’t get rid of her piercings), myself into a pugnacious-looking redhead, and Marcone into an unassuming older gentleman, the sort you’d expect to find behind the counter of a secondhand bookstore. Molly was milling around on the steps in front of his office, while Marcone sat on a bench and pretended to read a newspaper. He was stationed with a clear view of the door, since he was the one who could recognize Jonathan and signal to Molly when he came out. Meanwhile, I was lurking beneath a veil, trying to keep from accidentally bumping pedestrians. 

I kept an eye on Molly and Marcone while a steady flow of people passed around us. It was busy enough that I was a little worried we might not spot Jonathan in the crowd. 

Five o’clock came and went. Marcone methodically worked his way through the newspaper. I wished that I’d brought something to read too, grumpily checking my watch again for the third time in ten minutes. I’d forgotten how all-fired _boring_ stakeouts tended to be. I was just beginning to wonder if we should risk making another call to confirm that he was still there, when Molly’s posture abruptly changed, her spine straightening. 

I followed her gaze sharply and spotted a slim, pony-tailed man with a briefcase coming down the steps. He paused midway down, squinting in the sunlight and raising a hand to shield his eyes, scanning the street as if for a taxi, but when he lowered his hand and continued down I could see that it was indeed our guy. 

_Houston, we have a go!_ I thought giddily. I darted through the flow of foot traffic toward the two of them on the stairs, trying to get as close as I could without risking giving us away. Molly was already moving to intercept him, and I came in range just in time to hear her call out his name to get his attention. 

Up close, I realized that the driver’s license photo hadn’t done the man justice. Though driver’s license photos usually don’t, his in particular had failed to convey how  just how drop-dead gorgeous this guy was—he looked like Hollywood’s idea of a hot nerd, as if some costume director had stolen the clothes off a D&D geek and stuck them on a runway model. That gave me a moment’s pause, because Tabby was cute, sure, but she was no knockout and I wondered how she’d managed to land this guy. 

Upon hearing his name, Jonathan had stopped, and was now looking blankly at Molly as though wondering if he ought to recognize her. I wasn’t close enough to hear what he said when she reached him, but from the politely bewildered look on his face, I figured it was some variant of “Do I know you?” 

Snatches of her reply reached me as she began talking a mile a minute, gesticulating agitatedly and obviously in distress. She was starting to draw some curious attention from the other people on the steps, no doubt coworkers of his, and I could see Jonathan’s eyes dart about uncomfortably. He shook his head, trying to soften his refusal with an obviously strained smile, his face apologetic. He moved as if trying to leave, but Molly cut him off, grabbing his arm to clutch desperately with both hands, her mouth shaping a word that was obviously ‘please.’ 

Hamstrung, thanks to the public setting we’d chosen, he didn’t have much choice but to give in and usher her off the steps as quickly as he could manage, before any more of his coworkers could see him being accosted by a crazy woman. 

They went two blocks, Marcone and I both following behind at a distance, before Molly affected to see a side street as the perfect place to talk in relative privacy and tugged him toward it. I doubt there’s a chance in hell he would have set foot in an alley with a stranger if this had been night, but nobody expects to get kidnapped at 5 o’clock in the afternoon, not by a young woman and not two blocks from his own office. He never even looked behind him. 

“—look, I really don’t think I can help you,” I heard him saying as I slipped into the alley after him. Molly had broken away and hurried on ahead of him, and now he was trotting to catch up with her. “I don’t know what you think I am, but—”

I never got to hear the end of what he said, because that was when he stepped over the lip of the circle. Molly dropped a veil over the whole area, just as I shouted, “ _Laqueus!_ ” and the circle immediately flared to life, trapping him within a diameter of ten feet. 

He spun around immediately, dropping the briefcase, his eyes blazing with sudden, fierce wariness as he scanned for his attacker. He had taken a defensive stance that seemed more appropriate for a physical fight than for readying magic, but I had no time to contemplate the oddity of that before I brought up the tranquilizer gun and planted a dart right next to his pocket protector. 

The whirring dart broke the integrity of the circle, of course, but that was fine. We’d only needed it to hold him for a moment, and now he was staggering backward, swaying on his feet, one hand windmilling as if to catch himself when he fell. 

Which was when the plan went pear-shaped. 

Instead of crumpling to the ground like he was supposed to, he swayed for a few seconds, then steadied, reaching up to grab clumsily for the dart that had struck him. He managed to clasp his fingers around it, before he lifted his gaze to fix on me. I had just long enough to register that his eyes had gone a chill, silvery-blue and his teeth were drawn in a snarl, before he was tearing the dart from his chest and _hurling it at me_ , with all the speed and accuracy of the gun itself. 

Shit, shit, _shit_ , he wasn’t a wizard—he was a White Court vampire, and hell if we’d come prepared to take down one of those. I should have realized it from the first moment I set eyes on him, but that’s one of their survival traits, going unrecognized for what they are, even by someone who _knows_ about the White Court. 

I didn’t even have time to wonder how Tabby could  possibly have failed to notice that she’d married an incubus by accident. I threw up an arm to protect myself, out of sheer, blessed reflex, and I felt the thump as the sleeve of my duster caught the dart. The protective enchantments kept it from penetrating, which was good, otherwise I would have been, well, asleep. Meanwhile, in just the brief second that had elapsed, Jonathan had taken off running. 

He abandoned his briefcase to its fate and bolted for the far exit of the alley, away from the street, and was feinting from side to side looking for an opening to get past Molly, planted squarely in the middle and ready to stop him. 

“He’s White Court!” I shouted in warning, ripping the dart away and pelting after him. I had to trust that she’d heard me, since I couldn’t afford to take my eyes off him even long enough to confirm that.

I was trying to get a clear angle from which I could _forzare_ him, since even a vampire needs a few moments to recover their wits after being slammed into a wall, but he was moving too fast and I’d be in danger of hitting Molly with it. 

He heard me coming up behind him, glanced over his shoulder at me, then darted his gaze back to Molly, looking hunted. In a blurred flash of motion he suddenly grabbed a pen from his shirt pocket, tearing the cap off and flinging it at me like a knife. My duster saved me again, but there was no doubt that if I hadn’t been wearing it, I would have a Pilot pen imbedded in my lung right now. Jesus, this guy was as good with projectile weapons as Marcone was. 

And speaking of Marcone— 

I glanced behind me, hoping I could warn him off before he got too close. Neither he nor Molly had come prepared for a throw-down, and Marcone didn’t even have the benefit of being a wizard. 

Just then Molly screamed, “ _Look out!_ ” and something slammed into my head from my blind spot, sending me sprawling across the uneven concrete. My vision was spinning, but I saw Jonathan’s shape blur past me, making for the street exit this time, and someone that could only be Marcone at the far end. I shook my head to clear it, pawing at the ground to push myself up, and then a moment later Molly was grabbing my arm and hauling me along with her. 

It took me a minute to realize that Jonathan now lay in an ungainly sprawl on the pavement, not ten fe et from the oblivious passerby on the sidewalk beyond. Marcone stood over him, though he remained a cautious distance away; in one hand he held a nightstick, in the other, the stun gun whose wires still trailed from Jonathan’s unconscious form. 

“Did the tranquilizer finally kick in?” I panted, planting my hands on my thighs to bend over while I caught my breath.

Marcone surveyed the fallen vampire dispassionately. “Mmm. I suspect it had more to do with being coshed over the head while he was recovering from the effects of the taser.” 

A little more police-brutality-esque than I might have liked, but it was too late for that now. Besides, vampires could recover from pretty much anything short of decapitation. 

“Though I hope you have a more permanent solution,” he continued. “Because I wouldn’t count on this to keep him down for long.”

“Yeah, I can handle that.” I pushed myself upright and came over to examine the vampire we’d managed to catch.

I was leery, half expecting him to pop back up again like a cockroach or a horror movie reject, but he stayed down for the count even as I worked a binding spell around his hands and ankles. For his mouth, I fished a slightly wrinkled bandanna out of a deep pocket and used it as a makeshift gag. All evidence suggested that he was a vampire _and_ a practitioner, and if he woke up early, the last thing I wanted was for him to be able to rain down hellfire on us. 

When I was satisfied that he wasn’t going anywhere, I motioned to Marcone that he was clear to remove the taser. Molly retrieved Jonathan’s briefcase and went out to the street to hail Hendricks, our getaway driver; Marcone and I followed a moment later under the veil, awkwardly manhandling Jonathan’s inert body into the backseat. 

Let me tell you, there is nothing to take your mind off being crowded against your hot mobster boyfriend like a having a bound-and-gagged wizard vampire pressed up on your other side, ready to spring to life and start tearing shit up at any moment. 

Fortunately we weren’t taking him back to the safehouse, so it was twenty minutes to a mob-owned motel where a room waited, rather than an hour to Michigan, but that was still one hell of a car ride. I just about had a heart attack every time the car hit a bump that jolted Jonathan’s limp body, and I was all too happy to put some distance between me and the comatose vamp when we arrived at our destination. 

Molly oversaw the loading as we hustled him inside the motel room, the only one visible as Marcone and I worked under the veil. Hendricks, as per Marcone’s orders, waited outside in the car to keep an eye on the place and make sure we hadn’t been tailed. 

Inside, Molly was flipping on the lights and jerking open the curtains to allow sunshine through the frosted glass windows. Jonathan was still out cold, but I didn’t let myself begin to relax until he was secured in the room’s only chair, a garishly upholstered red thing that looked like a prop from an eighties porno. After I was confident that I had trussed him to the chair as securely as was humanly possible, I called the job done and collapsed onto the twin bed, sending up a cloud of musty air. The entire room smelled like stale cigarette smoke, as mundane and unremarkable as any of the gazillion other motels skirting Chicago. 

It was difficult to imagine a less likely place for this operation, and I said as much. 

Marcone, who had the supply case open on the other bed and was rummaging through it for something, paused to lift his eyes and glance around the room as though just noticing it. “Hmm, I suppose so. Well, beggars can’t be choosers.” 

The silence from Molly was a bit uncharacteristic, so I craned my neck to look at her. She had settled at the head of the bed and was gazing pensively at the featureless white glow of the window. 

“Molly? You doing okay, kid?” I asked.

She looked up, forcing a weak smile. “Yeah. I was just thinking about how I’m a lot more okay with this kidnapping and date-rape-drug thing, now that I know we’re dealing with a vampire instead of a human. And wondering if that makes me an asshole.” 

“No, I think that’s pretty normal.” I grimaced and gave a shrug. “You can’t help rooting for the home team.”

“Indeed,” Marcone agreed absently, lifting a vial of clear liquid to the light and frowning at it. “Then shall I give this to him?”

My jaw clenched slightly as my conscience pricked at me. _Off the reservation_ , Molly had said. _Necessary,_ I countered, and gave him a curt nod. 

It was more than a little unnerving to see how efficiently Marcone managed it, tipping Jonathan’s head back while the vampire was still unconscious and splashing the liquid down his unresisting throat. Jonathan swallowed once, reflexively, and down it went. 

“So now we wait.” Marcone stepped back, capping the bottle again and conscientiously putting it back in the case. “According to the specialist I consulted, the drug takes effect twenty to thirty minutes after administration and can cause up to eight hours of actual amnesia. Granted, that’s assuming the subject is human, which Mr. Williams here is not.”

And it was semi-scientifically-established fact that vampires have a faster metabolism than humans, which meant that we settled in for a tense vigil while we waited for Jonathan to wake up. I took the opportunity to check his briefcase, in case he was carrying any useful information, but unless Attenborough was working his nefarious plan through patent law, it seemed unlikely. I put the papers away and closed up the briefcase again. 

It was only about ten minutes, but felt more like ten hours, before Jonathan’s shoulder suddenly jerked as he tried to lift his arm, and we all came to attention. He’d taken a scuff across his cheek, and he looked terribly beautiful and tragic as he sat there dazed in the chair. Stupid White Court vampires. It took another minute or two for him to finish blinking his way to consciousness; I couldn’t tell if the drug was working yet. 

His gaze landed first on Marcone, nostrils flaring and eyes narrowing slightly as if he almost recognized him by scent, but then his attention gravitated to me and Molly like a magnet. I guessed that he could sense us for the wizards we were. 

“Who are you?” he demanded roughly. He coughed once to clear the stuff Marcone had forced down his throat and grimaced at the taste. “Why are you doing this to me?”

I considered how to begin. He seemed disconnected, not alert like he had been when talking to Molly earlier, so I had to assume it was the drugs—that, or a head injury. Might as well get started. 

“We want to know about Attenborough,” I told him at last. “We know that he’s broken the Laws of Magic and we know that you’re working for him. So what’s he up to?”

Jonathan’s gaze narrowed to a poisonous glare. 

“Okay, if that’s the way you want to play it. Then maybe you could tell me why you’ve been making magical land mines capable of blowing an entire city block to kingdom come. And while you’re at it, tell me why I shouldn’t just turn you over to the White Council and let them deal with you.”

His eyes widened with genuine shock. “How did you know about my wards?” 

“Magic,” I said glibly. “Why, was that supposed to be a secret?”

“Who are you?” he repeated, a little more urgently.

“Nuh-uh, buddy. As long as you’re in that chair and I’ve got my posse here, you’re answering _my_ questions. Why are you making those bombs?”

His well-shaped lips thinned. “They’re my last line of defense.” 

“Hell of a _defense_ ,” I observed, putting ironic emphasis on the last word. “They’ll blow your house sky-high, taking your wife and everyone else in the neighborhood with it.”

“I don’t have any other choice,” he said tightly. “If that’s what it takes, then so be it.”

“Takes to do what?” I pushed.

His only answer was a moody scowl. 

I kept my game face on, but the niggling sense that something was off here had begun to gnaw at the corner of my mind. He was obviously hiding a lot, but he wasn’t acting like an enemy prisoner, and I didn’t think that was entirely the drugs. I decided to change tack. 

“So I hear you’ve been playing with hellfire. That can get you in a lot of trouble too, you know. The wardens won’t be happy to hear about that.”

“Blow me,” Jonathan enunciated coldly, punctuating that with a lithe twist of his hips that, yeah, derailed my brain into considering it for a hundredth of a second.

“Come on, Williams, you’ve gotta give me more than that to work with—how about the thing on North Avenue Beach? Lots of people up and walk into the water, you wouldn’t happen to know anything, would you?”

He stilled, then said carefully, “ _I_ had nothing to do with that.” 

_Bingo_ . I could feel myself straightening. “But you know who did.” It wasn’t question. 

His expression had changed, his face lifting and his eyes narrowing a fraction as he studied me, something dangerous glinting in them. “And you _don’t_ ,” he said slowly, like it was a revelation. “You have no idea what’s going on. You’re just fishing.” 

“Maybe. But that doesn’t mean I won’t catch anything.”

“You’ll catch something you wish you hadn’t,” he said bluntly.

“What, like you?”

Jonathan rolled his eyes and made a short, contemptuous noise like he thought I was an idiot. 

“Focus, Williams—North Avenue Beach. Whodunit?”

He slouched in the chair and gave me a magazine model’s glower. “Do your own damn homework. Though you could start by noticing who the victims were.” 

I blinked, brows drawing together. I’d been working on the assumption that the choice of victims was random, a cross-section of your ordinary afternoon beachgoers. Surely Murphy would have told me if there was anything noteworthy about them. If she’d noticed, that is. 

“Why? Who were they?”

“Fuck you. Let me go.” He tipped his head back and looked down the bridge of his nose at me haughtily.

I hissed out a sigh. “Damn it, if I weren’t one of the good guys I would be sorely tempted to start knocking you around a bit,” I growled. 

He was giving me a look of intense, narrow-eyed scrutiny, or he was trying to, but he seemed to be having more trouble focusing now. The drug couldn’t be reaching its peak already, could it? I glanced at my watch—we hadn’t even been talking for five minutes. At this rate he was likely to burn through the entire dosage before I finished asking questions. 

“If you think you’re one of the good guys, then what the hell do you think I am?” he asked curiously, slurring a little as the drug started hampering his ability to modulate his voice. 

“The guy who’s prepared to kill several hundred innocent civilians if the mine on his house gets tripped, _that’s_ what I think you are.”

He made some vague noise of assent, but his eyes had gone somewhat unfocused and slid over the room to stare at Marcone again. 

“Jonathan,” I said sharply. “Why did you rig up your own house with those bombs?”

“Last line of defense,” he murmured almost inaudibly, still gazing with blank eyes at Marcone.

“Against who? Against me?” I asked, momentarily forgetting that he didn’t know who ‘I’ was.

He shook his head dumbly. 

“Look, we can help you. We can protect you,” I promised. “But not if we don’t know what we’re up against.”

He still wouldn’t even look at me. I finally lost my temper. 

“ANSWER ME, DAMN IT!” I shouted, loud enough that I think everyone in the room jumped. I leaned forward and grabbed the unresponsive vampire by the shoulders, forcing him to look at me and giving him a hard shake. He flopped limply in my hands, eyes sliding to me again but giving away nothing.

“Whose hair did you tie to the wards?” I demanded. “Who’s going to trigger them?”

He shook his head, smiling enigmatically, and then didn’t stop shaking it. 

“What have you been doing with hellfire?”

Still shaking his head, still smiling. 

“What do you know about the drownings?”

Nothing. 

“For the love of God, what are you hiding?” I asked, my voice breaking with anger and frustration. I released him and sat back, at a loss.

“You have to take me home,” Jonathan said into the silence that followed, a non-sequitur with childlike solemnity.

I snorted. “Yeah right.” 

“No!” He sat up in the chair, pulling futilely at the restraints, real fear in his face. “You have to let me go!”

“We don’t have to do anything.”

“No, please! I _have to go home!_ If I run…” he broke off, shaking his head and meeting my eyes in a mute entreaty “If I _run_ —”

“This is useless,” I muttered in exasperation, turning to the others. “We’re not getting anything from him.”

Marcone was leaning against the wall with his arms crossed and a deep frown on his face. “Has it occurred to you that there might be a reason for that?” he asked, eyes flicking to me and placing a subtle weight on the words. 

I blinked. “What?” 

“If I run—” Jonathan began again from behind me, but I ignored him.

“Molly?”

“Harry,” she said, an odd note in her voice. With her eyes fixed on the vampire behind me, she lifted her hand and pointed.

I looked back at Jonathan. There was a mad light dancing in his eyes and his smile was not at all vague as he looked between the three of us with bizarre excitement. He gave a short laugh, as if he couldn’t believe what was happening. 

“If I run,” he repeated, grinning at me as if we were sharing a joke. 

“ _What?_ ” I finally gave in and asked. “What happens if you run?”

“If I run. If I _run_.” There was a catch at the end as he said it, his intonation slightly different each time, like some demented child toying with a meaningless phrase in a foreign language. “If I run. _If I run_ , if I run, if I run, if I run if I run if I run if I run ifIrunifIrun…”

My first thought was, _Oh crap, we broke him,_ then all at once, the penny dropped and I could feel my skin prickling, the hair on my arms rising. 

Because remember what I said about silencing spells going awry? 

Yeah, it sounds like that. 

 

So, Jonathan Ailill Williams had a silencing spell on him too. Which meant that if he’d been working for Attenborough, he’d probably been doing it about as enthusiastically as Marcone had been—which is to say, not at all. 

The first thing I did after picking my jaw up off the floor was to release him from the binding spells. I was a little bit concerned that he would promptly knock me on my ass for having him coshed and trussed up, not to mention the drugs we’d shoved down his throat, but if anything they’d just made him benignly woozy. He was still chuckling to himself and muttering under his breath, accepting my support with good grace as I helped him to the motel’s tiny, grungy bathroom and suggested that he try to induce vomiting. 

Molly had come to see if I needed any assistance and hovered in the doorway, the look on her face profoundly uncomfortable. I didn’t need a mirror to know that I probably looked the same way. 

Because stars and _stones_ , of all the fuckups to make, drugging and interrogating the very last guy who deserved it . This was not going down in the books as one of Harry Dresden’s finer moments. After a few minutes Jonathan told us, polite if somewhat muzzy, that he could handle it on his own now. I was happy to give him the privacy, grateful that I didn’t have to watch the retching, heaving consequences of my own mistake. 

Back in the main room, I let out the sigh I’d been holding in and sank my face into my hands. 

“Christ Almighty,” I heard Molly say, voicing my sentiments exactly.

Only Marcone seemed unaffected by guilt, leaning against the wall with his arms folded. It was extremely odd seeing his mannerisms on the type of man who didn’t look like he should have had the confidence to pull them off. 

“We don’t have time for this now,” he said pitilessly. “You can worry about the moral issues later, but right now we need to consider how this changes things.”

He was right, of course. Cold as it seemed to put our screw-up with Jonathan on the backburner, Marcone was nothing if not practical, and practically speaking, we didn’t have time to waste now. 

“You didn’t know that he was a vampire before?” I asked Marcone, without much optimism.

He shook his head. “It hadn’t escaped my notice that he was uncommonly attractive, but no, I hadn’t made that connection.” 

“I didn’t pick up on it either, but I should have,” Molly added, chagrined. “He is _really_ hot.”

I eyeballed her. “Don’t get ideas, kiddo. Besides, White Court vampires are about as interchangeably gorgeous as Barbie dolls—seen one, you’ve seen ’em all.” 

“Which begs the question of what anyone wanted from him,” Marcone pondered aloud.

“Besides carnal knowledge?” I said dryly.

Marcone ignored that. “You said it yourself, he couldn’t have been more than a middling practitioner at best. And the vampire courts have somewhat of a hive mentality—an attack on one is regarded as an attack on them all. I can’t imagine why anyone would knowingly invite their wrath.” 

Molly worried at the ring in her lip with her teeth, frowning as she tried to make the pieces fit. “You’ve got a point,” she said to Marcone. “I mean, I can see why that Attenborough would want to get his claws in _you_ —you’ve got money, power, and independent status on the Accords. But what good does this guy do him?” 

I was silent. There was something that was still bothering me, something that I felt I ought to remember. 

“You know, I don’t even understand how he’s an incubus at all,” I puzzled out slowly. “I talked to his wife—she’s the one who hired me to find out what was wrong with him. She didn’t even know that he was a wizard and she _certainly_ had no idea that he was a vampire. You’d think that’s something she would have… noticed…”

I trailed off as the realization hit me. She would have noticed because she _loved_ him. Tabby was, no two ways about it, head-over-heels, till-death-do-us-part, _in love_ with her husband. Which meant that Jonathan should have been trapped in the same vicious, tragic circle that my brother and the love of _his_ life were in—unable to be together, but unwilling to be apart. The only way to escape that would be if he… 

“Harry?” Marcone asked.

“Just a moment,” I said, excusing myself and striding back to the bathroom.

I opened the door to find Jonathan sitting on the floor, his back against the wall. He looked up, vacant and inquisitive, when I stuck my head in. 

“Tabby doesn’t know you’re a vampire.”

He solemnly shook his head. 

“She loves you,” I said with certainty. “You shouldn’t be able to touch her, unless…”

Jonathan smiled beatifically, a radiant smile of such transcendent joy that I could feel a orchestra of soulful violins just dying to accompany it. “She’s the only woman I’ve ever loved, and the only one I ever will.” 

White Court trivia, little-known but true! If a vampire can find True Love™ before succumbing to their hunger, then they have the chance to break the curse that forever divorces love from sex. In other words, if the first time they make love really is about _love_ , then they never develop into a fully-fledged incubus/succubus, and they can live a nearly-human existence. They just get the benefit of a being a _really hot_ human without the drawbacks of being White Court, which is patently unfair in my opinion. 

“Your first time was with Tabby,” I guessed.

“My brothers made sure of it,” he replied matter-of-factly. Which, considering what _keeping it in the family_ meant among the Raith, I was fairly certain I didn’t want to know about.

“Okay. Then you stay here for a while longer.”

“Alright,” he agreed peaceably while I ducked out again.

“He’s latent,” I informed Marcone and Molly a moment later, then gave them a brief summary of how that was possible.

“Interesting,” Marcone said slowly. “And if what you say is true, extremely rare. But if anything that makes my earlier question even more pertinent: why him? He doesn’t even have the usual abilities of a White Court vampire.”

There was a momentary lull, in which I failed to come up with an answer. 

“Maybe _because_ he’s latent?” Molly hazarded after a moment or so, making a face that said she was reaching for straws and she knew it. “Harry, is there anything they can do that regular vampires can’t?”

“Apart from being allowed to touch their true love? Not really. And that doesn’t seem like the sort of superpower that an evil overlord would get much mileage from. They’re mostly no different from really hot, slightly-faster-than-average humans.”

We three exchanged glances in silence, until at last Molly heaved a sigh. “Well, you’re the only one with a White Court vampire on speed-dial, Harry—maybe Thomas can tell us what someone would want with this guy.” 

I located the cheap rotary phone on the bedside table and tried to remember Thomas’s cellphone number. Then, realizing that he had better be at my place, I hung up and dialed my own number instead. 

Thomas picked up after three rings. “Hello?” 

“Hey there, _Toe-moss_ ,” I said. “Glad to see you’re still holding down the fort.”

“Heya, slacker. I hope you’re calling to tell me I can go home now. Admit it, this whole ‘dead’ thing is just an excuse to keep from cleaning out your fridge, isn’t it?”

“I should be so lucky. Sorry, but you’re stuck at my swinging bachelor pad for a while longer. So, I’ve got a White Court question—I think we accidentally kidnapped one of yours, does the name Jonathan Williams ring any bells?”

“Nope,” Thomas said promptly, one of the few people I could count on to be unfazed by the casual mention of kidnapping.

“Damn. How about Isaiah, or… Daniel? Isaiah and Daniel Williams?”

“Mmm… no, and no.”

I squinted, scouring my memory to recall that conversation with Murphy. “Jacqueline Borlais?” 

“Aha, now we’re getting somewhere. I don’t know any Jacqueline, but I do know the Borlais clan. They’re a Raith offshoot, they live out in California.”

“How about a Cary? Know anybody kicking around with the name Cary Borlais?”

The silence on the other end was deafening. “Uh… _yeah?_ ” Thomas said at last, sounding like he couldn’t believe just how much of a complete and utter moron I was. “Carolinus Borlais? He’s only the Lord Raith of the West Coast.” 

_Aaaaand_ there was the punchline. 

“Oh,” I said, very quietly. “Oops.”

“Good god, please tell me you didn’t kidnap his—”

“His grandson, I think.”

“Holy—” Thomas moved the receiver from his mouth for a few minutes so I didn’t catch his profanity, which was almost a shame. “Okay, Harry?” he said when he came back, his voice deadly serious. “I can’t help you with this one. I really, really can’t. If my name comes up in so much as a _whisper_ in a move like this against the Borlais, I’d be implicating the Raiths as complicit. I could end up dragging Chicago’s entire White Court into a blood feud that they had nothing to do with, and being flayed alive would be a _mercy_ compared to what Lara would do to me after that.”

I winced. “Understood. I’m not asking you to do anything more than eat my Pringles and hold my couch down with your butt.” 

“And a magnificent butt it is too. Women the world over would _weep_ to see it come to harm.”

“Yeah, yeah, bite me.”

“Only if you ask nicely, Harry,” he murmured, probably a joke, but I still had to suppress a shiver even over the phone. Honestly, White Court vampires. 

I hung up and turned to my partners in crime—a turn of phrase that was uncomfortably literal at the moment. 

“Bad news, Scooby Gang,” I said, dropping heavily onto the edge of the bed.

“We kidnapped someone really important,” Molly guessed flatly.

“Grandson of someone really important,” I corrected, not that it made much difference. “Specifically, grandson of the Grand Poobah of the White Court in California.”

“I think you’re missing the point,” Marcone mildly. “ _We_ may not have known who he was, but there’s little chance that his… employer didn’t. And if our misunderstanding could be construed as an insult to his house, how many orders of magnitude greater would laying a compulsion on the patriarch’s scion be? I’m guessing that whatever game is being played with him, it’s dependent on his relation to this… Cary, you said?”

“Carolinus,” came a quiet voice from the doorway. “My great-grandfather.”

I turned to see that Jonathan had emerged from the bathroom and was standing half-hidden in the shadowed hallway. No telling how long he’d been listening. I beckoned for him to join us and he did, coming into the room and evidently having no compunctions about seating himself in the chair that he had recently been tied to. 

“You must be Harry Dresden,” he said, addressing me. “You knew about the wards because Tabby told you.”

I figured the game was up, so I nodded. 

He seemed to relax, the muscles in his shoulders loosening. There was nothing disconnected in his manner now; the drugs had apparently run their course and were long gone from his system. Note to self: never count on drugs meant for humans to keep a White Court vamp down. 

“Good,” he said simply, nodding. “I didn’t know whether she’d been in touch with you.”

“So you were trying to get me involved with this. Why me? What were you hoping I’d do?”

“You are the local presence of the White Council, are you not? Champion of righteousness? Why wouldn’t a law-abiding citizen turn to you for help?” He gave a hard smile. “Though really, all I was expecting was for you to blunder around until you accidentally kicked over an anthill. From what I hear, you’re good at that.”

“Lies and slander,” I muttered. “So, have I kicked the right anthill yet?”

“You seem to be getting warmer.”

Oh, how I wished we’d thought to bring Bob with us, though there was no way we could have guessed that we’d find ourselves dealing with another silencing spell. I glanced at my watch. “You said you have to get home. Because if you up and vanish, then… what?” 

Silence. And not even a flicker of expression to give me a hint. 

“You can’t say,” I realized, his earlier words clicking into place. “And that’s how you managed to drop a wrench in the works, with an if-then statement that the spell won’t let you finish. He’s threatening Tabby, isn’t he? If you run, then she gets it?”

“I would do anything to protect her,” Jonathan confirmed grimly.

“Even if it means killing her? Blowing her up if Attenborough manages to find his way to your house and trigger the wards?”

“If it means saving her from a worse fate than death, yes.”

Christ, but they were playing for keeps, weren’t they. I didn’t even want to know what threats our bad guy had managed to spook a vampire with. 

“Here’s to hoping you won’t have to,” I replied. “Look, I don’t know what time your curfew is, so I think we should call it a day for now. If possible, I’d like to meet again, and next time I’ll bring someone who’s better at getting information from silencing spells.”

Jonathan nodded, rising to his feet. “Indeed, I would be glad to.” He drew his wallet from his back pocket and produced a business card, resting his eyes on it for a moment before passing it to me. “Well, you know how to reach me, so unless you needed something else…” He glanced at Marcone and Molly to extend the question to them. 

“We’re really sorry for kidnapping you,” Molly blurted out.

Jonathan dismissed it with a careless wave, stooping to gather up his briefcase. “Needs must,” he said, unconcerned. 

“Wait,” I said hastily, as an idea suddenly occurred to me. I yanked open the drawer on the bedside table to find a notepad of motel stationary and a cheap ballpoint pen.

_Mrs. Williams,_ I scribbled out quickly. _Your husband is under a silencing spell that’s keeping him from confiding in you, but he’s innocent and doing what he can to protect you. Listen to him, trust him to have your safety at heart, and know that I’m on the case. –Harry_

“Here,” I said, folding it in halves and thrusting it at him. “Give this to Tabby.”

Jonathan glanced at the folded paper in his hand and then regarded me gravely. “What does it say?” 

“Well, if you knew that, you might not be able to give it to her.”

He considered that for a moment. “She doesn’t need to know about my past,” he said in a tone that a less mellow guy than me might think was a threat. 

“And she won’t.” I nodded at the note. “But I think you want her to have that.”

I could see as he reached his decision to trust me and tucked the note into his pocket. “Alright, then I’ll be on my way. But Dresden?” 

I looked up. 

“I suggest you hurry.”

And with that unambiguous warning, he let himself out. 


	9. Chapter 9

The mood was subdued when we returned to the safehouse. Hendricks dropped us off, lingering for a few minutes’ private conversation outside with Marcone. Molly used the phone in the kitchen to call and check in with her mother, a conversation I overheard snatches of and had the rote cadence of a ritual. I heard her say, “Aww, _Mom,_ come on!” a few times but when she finally hung up, her disgruntled expression clearly said that she’d lost the argument. 

“I have to go home for a bit,” she announced. “Mom says I have to join them for dinner, and then Daniel has some choir thing tonight that she wants me to go to. Unless you could call her back and tell her that you really need me here...?” she suggested, without much optimism.

“Forget it, grasshopper, I wouldn’t cross your mother for anything short of the apocalypse. Go home, touch base with your folks, we’re not doing anything else tonight.”

“You’d better not,” she grumbled, going upstairs to collect her stuff.

She left while I was on the phone trying to call Murphy about the drownings again. Her cellphone rang once and then went straight to voicemail, so I left a message (“Hi Murph, this is, uh, Larry”) telling her I’d received a tip that there might be something significant about the people who had drowned, and asking if she would mind reviewing the evidence one more time for some commonality between the victims. 

Then I dragged myself upstairs to see if I could catch a few hours of sleep before the next crisis popped up to demand my attention, only to find that a certain mob boss had made himself at home in my room. He had drawn the blinds and was changing out of his jeans into more comfortable clothes. 

“Was that Miss Carpenter I heard leaving?” he asked when I came in, eyes still adjusting to the dim room.

“Yeah. She had to go home to appease her mother.” I automatically averted my eyes when Marcone stripped off his shirt, then remembered I didn’t have to and looked back, a little embarrassed but also pleased. And oh yeah, enjoying the view.

He noticed me watching and smiled. “Mr. Hendricks could have escorted her,” he offered generously. 

I snorted. “Right, because letting one of your goons follow her home is _exactly_ what would endear me to Charity Carpenter. No thank you.” 

Marcone shrugged and pulled on a t-shirt then padded over to the bed to sit down, eyeing me as if contemplating what sequence of events would be necessary to get me into the bed next to him. 

“What are you planning to do?” I asked.

“Now? Take a nap. I’ve found I have better luck stealing a few hours of sleep during the day if I can.” He cocked a smile. “You’re welcome to join me.”

“For...?”

“Just sleeping. On my honor.”

“Rats.”

Which was how for the second time that day I found myself shucking off shoes and pants and crawling into bed with John Marcone. As habits went, I supposed it wasn’t that bad of one to get into, especially not when Marcone rolled over to wrap an arm around me from behind, his face settling against my neck. It was just _nice_ , this casual, comfortable intimacy—and not at all what I would have expected from mobster Marcone. 

“Man, your people would laugh _so hard_ if they knew you were a cuddler,” was the last thing I remember saying before dropping off to sleep.

 

We were yanked awake again when the phone rang, the blaring, utterly obnoxious metallic klaxon of older models. There was no longer any light coming in from behind the blinds and the room was pitch black, so it was several more excruciating rings before Marcone found the bedside lamp. The phone happened to be on his side of the bed, so he blearily pushed himself upright and made a grab for it, clearing his head with a brisk shake. 

“Hello?” he said, doing an extremely credible impression of a man who had not just been dragged from a sound sleep. He listened to thin voice on the other end and then said, “Yes, he is, just a moment.” He picked up the handset so that the cord would stretch and then held the phone out to me. “For you”

I took it. “Hello?” 

“Harry? It’s Murphy.”

“Hey, what’s going on?” I yawned silently, angling my mouth away from the headpiece and covering it so she wouldn’t hear.

“I looked up the info you asked for. Who’s your secretary?”

“What?” I wasn’t as good at pretending to be awake as Marcone was.

“The guy who answered your phone.”

“Oh.” My eyes flicked somewhat guiltily to Marcone, who was eavesdropping shamelessly and looking quietly amused. “Uhm. An associate?”

Murphy’s snort was unimpressed. “Fine, be that way,” she said, long-suffering. “This after I’ve been running around all over kingdom-come to dig up the information that you asked me to find, and seriously, am I on retainer to _you_ now, or what?” 

I winced. “Sorry, Murph. I, uh… really appreciate your help?” 

“Say it with chocolate, chump. Anyway, I took a closer look at the vics—nothing obvious jumps out, you’ve got the whole range of age, race, sex, etc. But when I went over the witness reports again, I found that everyone affected had been there together, part of the same group.”

I felt my pulse quicken. “Group of what?” 

“Well, in the statements taken, they just call it a ‘barbecue with some friends,’ but I’m going to take a wild leap and guess that it has something to do with the logo I see emblazoned across at least three t-shirts.”

“C’mon Murphy, you gonna make me beg for it?” I whined. “Don’t keep me in suspense.”

“Oh, I would totally make you beg for it, this is the most fun I’ve had all day. But here it is: Masters of the Archaic Glorious Intemerate Clairvoyance.”

The sheer overblown absurdity of that managed to stun me silly for a few seconds. “Bwa—huh?” I said when I found my tongue again. “Masters of the Glorious Archaic Incontinent _what?_ ” 

“Masters of the Archaic Glorious Intemerate Clairvoyance,” Murphy said again, with obvious relish.

I repeated it under my breath. “What the heck does ‘intemerate’ mean?” 

“Mr. I-got-a-1600-on-my-GRE Walker in forensics says it means ‘pure.’”

“Oh, but _of course_ ,” I said sarcastically. “Seriously, what is that, some kind of D&D thing?”

Though really, I shouldn’t have been so snarky. The various Orders of the Noble Whatsit and Brotherhoods of the Whozit that already populated my life sounded like they’d come straight out of swords-and-sorcery pulp. 

“Beats me.” I could hear the shrug in her voice. “Want me to read off the names, see if you recognize any?”

“Yeah, go for it.”

She did, and I listened intently, but for all they meant to me she might as well have been reading out of the phonebook for a different city. Marcone got up and wandered out during her recitation, either to resume his nap in the other room or go off on his own pursuits. 

“Well? Any of those sound familiar?” she prompted when she’d finished listing off the dead and injured.

“Not a one,” I admitted. “Got any others that managed to make it into the police report? Witnesses? Person who phoned it in?”

“Mmm…” I heard papers rustling on her end. “Dave Grant? His name’s on the transcript for the 911 call.”

“Doesn’t ring a bell.”

“How about Ray Gardner? Or Kelly… I don’t know how to pronounce this last name—Chmielewski?”

That might have stirred a faint memory, but at this point I was chalking it up to wishful thinking. “Nothing,” I sighed. 

Murphy echoed my sigh. “Well Harry, I can keep poking at it, but unless you can at least point me in the right direction, I’m probably just going to be chasing my tail. Do you even know what we’re looking for?” 

“No. All I know is that there’s something significant about the identity of the victims.”

“Officially there are no victims, because CPD’s already declared this an accident, bizarre but natural, case closed. Without evidence that it was perpetrated deliberately—or until it happens again—the higher-ups see it as a waste of manpower that could be used elsewhere.”

Marcone came back into the room, carrying a few sheets of printer paper. 

“I don’t know what to tell you, Murphy,” I admitted. “This is the best lead I’ve gotten yet and I have strong reason to suspect that it’s connected to the other stuff that’s been going on, but I know you’ve got other fires to put out. I just think that if we could figure out who these people were, why they were targeted, we’d be that much closer to unraveling the whole—what’s this?”

I asked that because Marcone had just climbed onto the bed and dropped the papers in my lap. 

“Harry?” Murphy asked, since she couldn’t exactly see what had caught my attention.

“Hold on a sec,” I said distractedly, picking up the papers to glance over them. “I just got a—”

 

**M** ASTERS OF THE  **A** RCHAIC 

**G** LORIOUS  **I** NTEMERATE  **C** LAIRVOYANCE 

*** * ***

A fun, all-inclusive social circle for casual practitioners and allies! 

 

It had been printed off a website—even someone as computer-illiterate as me could tell that—evidently the homepage of a group that claimed to be wizards. Which was patently impossible, since real wizards couldn’t even be in the same room as a computer for any length of time, much less use one to make a webpage for their club. But then my eye caught on the garish background, a retina-searing yellow with a dense, repeated runic pattern on it in blue, and I realized that it hadn’t just been cribbed out of a “New Age Designs for Dummies” book, it was an actual spell. A spell for—I squinted at it to make sure I was reading it right—curing acne. Okay, so maybe one of their “allies” had made the website. Or maybe they just sucked so much that they didn’t even have enough of an aura to mess up electronics. 

“Well I’ll be damned,” I said wonderingly. “They’re magic practitioners. Just… really, really lame ones.”

I scanned further down the page, looking at older notices about potluck dinners, _Babylon 5_ marathons, and a hiking trip/séance. Gosh, why hadn’t I joined these people ages ago? I could have been having so much _fun_ . 

“How’d you figure that out?” Murphy asked.

“I think Marcone just googled them.”

Marcone had been wearing a sleek, pleased expression, but when I said that it turned pained. It took me about two seconds to get why. 

“ _Marcone?_ ” Murphy demanded stridently. “You’ve got Marcone there with you?”

Oh, facepalm. In my head I could hear Ebenezar’s voice going, _Damn, boy, why’d anyone bother teaching you to talk?_

“Er... yeah,” I admitted with resignation, mostly because any attempt to deny it at this point would be too stupid for her to possibly believe.

“Oh for—” She broke off, audibly getting control of herself, and I waited it out in silence, dreading what was ahead. When she came back, her voice tight with fury. “You know what? _Screw you_ , Harry. Seriously. I have put myself on the line for you time and again, risking my reputation, my career, my _life_ to help you, and you don’t even have the decency to keep me marginally informed.”

“Murphy, I didn’t mean to—”

“No, you did. You knew I was worried that Marcone was dead, and you deliberately let me keep thinking that, never mind how much of a relief it would have been to know that he wasn’t. Jesus, do you have _any idea_ what kind of crisis we’re dealing with here? CPD’s practically muzzled everyone on the force to slow the news of Marcone’s disappearance from reaching the public, trying to keep this goddamn powder keg from exploding. We’re facing the kind of out-and-out gangland warfare that Chicago hasn’t seen in a generation, and I _still_ find the time to go haring off on some wild goose chase for you!”

My stomach was sinking lower and lower until I just wanted to crawl under the covers and hide. Marcone had tactfully taken himself somewhere else, so I put my hand over my face and bore out her tirade in silence. 

“Look, Harry, I know you mean well. I know you’d take a bullet for me—that’s not the problem. The fact is, there’s more to friendship than the grand gestures. There’s respect, there’s trust, and what the _hell?_ Do you really think I can’t be trusted to keep my mouth shut about something this important?”

“I do trust you,” I found my voice to insist. “It was just better that as few people as possible knew.”

She was silent for a long moment. “One of these days, Harry, your need-to-know bullshit is going to get someone killed,” she said, low and dangerous. “I just hope it’s not me. So until you learn to tell your ass from a hole in the ground, count me out. And if you need more information, ask Marcone to fucking _google_ it for you.” 

“Murphy—” I began, pained, but realized that she’d hung up. Curse cellphones and their lack of a satisfying clatter. I sighed, feeling like the lowest sort of scum, and replaced the headset, sitting on the bed in silence.

She was right, of course. I’d had my reasons for not telling her, but I’d known that she thought he was dead, known she was worried about it, and opted to lie by omission anyway. I pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes, feeling guilty and miserable. 

It seemed like everything lately had been coming around to bite me in the ass, even when I’d had good intentions, and if I were a superstitious man I’d be worried about what bad luck like this portended for the showdown that was on the horizon. Because there _would_ be a showdown sooner or later, against Attenborough and whatever reinforcements he managed to bring to bear. Events were converging far too rapidly for anything else. 

Finally I made myself get up and trudge downstairs after Marcone. I could hear water running in the kitchen and I arrived to find him washing up the dishes from breakfast, the ones no one had bothered to do that morning. He glanced up when I entered but said nothing, his expression neutral. 

I collapsed into a dinette chair and sighed heavily. “Well? Are you going to tear me a new one too, for slipping up and letting Murphy know that you’re here with me?” 

Marcone shut off the tap and turned to face me, bracing his hip against the counter and drying his hands on a dishtowel. 

“No. I already knew that your mouth has a tendency to outpace your thoughts on occasion, and one doesn’t take a lover expecting to change him,” he said philosophically.

Oh. I was pretty sure there was half an insult slipped in there, but mostly I was just grateful that I wouldn’t have to endure being read another richly-deserved riot act. 

The look on my face must have said that I wasn’t expecting that, for Marcone smiled somewhat fondly and turned back to the dishes. 

I sighed and folded my arms on the table, putting my head down. Powerful wizard, warden of the White Council, and all I wanted was a hug and for someone to reassure me that I wasn’t a totally horrible human being. John Marcone, much as I maybe liked him for other reasons, wasn’t the most qualified person for that. 

After a while the tap turned off, and I heard Marcone’s footsteps coming up behind me. A moment later his hands settled on the back of my neck, strong fingers rubbing at the sore muscles starting to stiffen there. I groaned in appreciation, helplessly letting my head fall forward to give him better access. When I’d been reduce d to a boneless puddle slumped over the table, he withdrew and took the chair next to me. 

“She’ll forgive you, Harry,” he said with quiet certainty.

I sat up slowly, rolling my shoulders and exploring my newly-loosened muscles. “I know. But the problem is that this isn’t the first time I’ve kept stuff from her, or even the second or the third.” I sighed, and shrugged restlessly. “Damn it, I was just trying to keep everyone safe. Safe as I could, anyway.” 

“Much as I sympathize with the impulse, I do wonder if you’re not giving the good sergeant enough credit. She’s proven remarkably adept at handling herself in the past.”

I lifted my eyes. “I wasn’t thinking just about her.” 

He didn’t reply right away, his eyes tightening imperceptibly as he met my gaze. The silence lasted longer than it should have, and when he spoke it was a response to words I hadn’t said aloud. 

“You don’t get to shelter me, Harry. That’s not what I signed on for.”

And _that_ was a whole different can of worms, one that w e’d probably still be wrangling about a year or five from now. Assuming we survived and/or stayed together that long.

I sighed and set my chin on my hands again, staring off at the gauzy curtains and the dark windows beyond them. “I think this is just hitting me harder because it’s coming so close on the heels of the royal botch-up we did with Jonathan earlier,” I admitted. 

Marcone didn’t reply, only shifted in his chair. 

I turned to watch him. “But you’re really not bothered by that at all, are you?” 

He favored me with a rueful smile, as if I’d caught him out. “Would you like me to pretend that I’m wracked with guilt?” 

“Can you pretend convincingly?” I asked sourly.

“Probably not.”

I thought about it for a bit longer and then I shook my head. “It wasn’t right and we shouldn’t have done it. We violently  kidnapped  an innocent man and then _drugged_ him to get the information we wanted. How can that possibly be right in your mind?” 

To his credit, Marcone’s answer was considered. “Well… it was necessary that you questioned him, and we had good reason to think that he might not cooperate willingly. The tools we used were effective, efficient, and no one was seriously hurt. Mr. Williams himself acknowledged the validity of our methods.” 

I gave a huff of disbelief. “Because he’s a White Court vampire. He’s probably seen enough to make date-rape look like jaywalking, _of course_ it didn’t bother him. But I like to think that the rest of us have marginally more respect for basic civil rights.” 

Marcone gave a dismissive wave. “Civil rights are for democracies to worry about. I run a benevolent dictatorship.” 

“Christ,” I muttered, putting my head down again. “Why do I even bother arguing with you?”

Marcone’s hand settled on the back of my neck again, fingers kneading into the muscles, while I tried to ignore how good it felt. “We’re not arguing, Harry, because I’m not trying to talk you round to my side. You asked me how I felt about it, and I told you.” 

“Speaking of your dictatorship,” I said into my arm. “At this rate, you might not have it much longer.”

I proceeded to tell him what Murphy had said about the unrest brewing in the underworld, and how the police were gearing up for a gangland free-for-all. Marcone listened in silence, and with his game face on he didn’t give much away. When I was finished he sighed, that affected, _“I’m disappointed with these developments”_ sigh that he used at times when lesser mortals would just have said a bad word or three. He didn’t seem at all surprised by the news. 

“Well, I suppose I’ll have to talk to a few people within my organization to see if the situation can be contained a while longer,” he concluded with mild regret, rising to his feet and crossing the kitchen again.

I had only the loosest conception of what it meant to run an organized crime outfit on the scale that Marcone did, and I was generally happy to keep it that way—though out of morbid curiosity I couldn’t keep from listening in. First he called Hendricks, apparently for an update on the situation, because he asked a few questions and hmmed a lot, then got off the phone with some coded order that was wholly opaque to me. I had been about to head upstairs when he signaled me over and then suddenly handed me the headset. 

“What?” I hissed, hearing the phone ringing over the earpiece. “Who are you calling? Why did you give it to me?”

The phone picked up. 

“Monoc Securities,” a female voice rapped out precisely.

Ohhh. “Ah... uhm, hi,” I rallied. “Is, uh... Miss Gard there?” 

“Speaking,” she said curtly, wasting neither time nor words. “Who is this?”

“Dresden. Harry Dresden, from Chicago—”

“I know who you are, Mr. Dresden.” Apparently she took her cues on nomenclature from her boss. “What do you want?”

“I know Marcone sent you on sabbatical last week—”

“If you’re looking to hire me, be aware that my contract with Mr. Marcone is still active and it precludes any activities detrimental to his business interests.”

“Oh no! God no, I’m not trying to hire you!” I assured her hastily. I didn’t even want to _think_ about how much it would cost to put a real live valkyrie on staff. “No, I’m—hey, Marcone, what am I even supposed to tell her? You want her to come back?”

He nodded, leaning against the counter and folding his arms as he watched me. 

“Okay, Marcone is here with me and we’re on the same side at the moment. I know he unhired you but now he needs to un-unhire you, probably ASAP.”

“Either put him on, or explain why he can’t tell me this himself,” she said flatly, sounding profoundly unimpressed.

I looked to Marcone. “Do I tell her?” 

He raised an eyebrow, which wasn’t any kind of answer. 

“To hell with it,” I muttered and then said to Gard, “He’s under a silencing spell. A White Council warden named Attenborough put it on him then made him send you away before you’d notice.”

Given the reaction that everyone else had to that news, I’d expected some measure of dismay from Gard, but if she’d even blinked there was no trace of it in her voice and I couldn’t tell whether or not she believed me. 

“Put Marcone on,” she ordered.

I rolled my eyes and passed the phone to Marcone. 

“Miss Gard,” he said courteously. He listened carefully for a few moments and then smiled slightly. “Yes, we are both alive, and only slightly inconvenienced.” He grimaced. “Mr. Dresden’s sense of humor doesn’t lean in that direction.”

Which I guessed was his roundabout way of saying _no_ , when she asked, _He’s joking, right?_

They exchanged a few more guarded pleasantries and then he put me back on the phone to answer some of her questions. She was (unsurprisingly) sharp and very knowledgeable, and didn’t need any general briefing about silencing spells, only about the particulars of our situation. 

“Well,” she concluded after I’d finished explaining. “The earliest I can be in Chicago again is tomorrow evening. Will that be sufficient or should I dispatch someone else for the interim?”

Marcone indicated that tomorrow evening was fine; I relayed the message, confirmed that this was the number where she could reach us, and then she closed the conversation as efficiently as she did everything else. 

“Alright, then as of tomorrow evening your valkyrie is going to be back in play,” I informed Marcone, handing him the phone. That was pretty heartening, actually—there’s nothing quite like riding into battle with a demigod at your back.

He nodded as if he’d expected no less. 

“Anyone else you need me to talk to?” I asked. “Because I want to call Jonathan back and figure out a time for him to come talk to Bob.”

“No, I think that will be it. If you want to use this phone, I can take my cell upstairs.”

“I’ll just be a minute,” I promised.

I fished the card from out of my wallet where I’d wedged it carelessly behind my driver’s license and laid it on the counter so I could read off the number. I had my finger on the dial when I realized the problem with this plan. 

The card I was holding wasn’t Jonathan’s. 

To be sure, it was the card that he’d given me—silky, silvery cardstock, smudged with dirty (bloody?) fingerprints where he’d held it, souvenirs from the fight it had taken to subdue him. But it was CAROLINUS ALBERIC BORLAIS whose name was emblazoned across the top, in a Copperplate font with heavy, raised ink. 

The first thought to cross my mind was, _Oh heck, he must have grabbed the wrong card_ . 

“Harry?” Marcone inquired when he noticed that I hadn’t made the call yet.

“Jonathan gave me his grandfather’s card—” and it was on the tip of my tongue to follow with _“…by accident”_ when I suddenly realized that it really, really hadn’t been. I remembered quite clearly how he’d taken it from his wallet, eyes lingering as he checked it before handing it to me.

_You know how to reach me_ , he’d said significantly on his way out, and he hadn’t been talking about the card. He meant that I was in contact with Tabby and could get ahold of him that way, if need be. 

“Oh, that tricky son of a bitch,” I murmured appreciatively, feeling my mouth stretching into a smile. “He’s just given us the green light to bring the entire west coast White Court down on Attenborough.”

Marcone came over to stand by the countertop, taking the card from my hand and examining it under the light. Then he smiled and picked up my hand, smoothing my palm flat and pressing the card face-down against it. The back was even more badly smudged than the front, rusty stains that couldn’t be mistaken for anything but blood. 

“I think that isn’t the only thing he’s given us,” Marcone said significantly. “What can you do with blood?”

It clicked. “ _Follow him_ ,” I breathed, exci tement sparking as the workings of a plan started to coalesce. And really, I shouldn’t have needed Marcone to point that out for me, but I’d had a lot on my mind lately, alright? “Son of a gun, Jonathan Williams is a magnificent bastard. God, both of you are—for giving his silencing spell the finger and finding ways to screw him over anyway.” 

Marcone chuckled, visibly pleased. “I’m glad you approve, Mr. Dr—” 

I caught him by the lapels and pulled his face to mine, silencing him with a kiss. It obviously took him by surprise, but if there’s one thing that Marcone’s good at, it’s thinking on his feet. He relaxed into it, taking his time and kissing me with a finesse that had me tightening my grip on him, pushing him against the edge of the counter. 

“We’re going to take this jerk down,” I told him fiercely when the kiss broke. “We are going to kick over his sandcastles and break his toys. We are going to steal his lunch money and shove pinecones up his ass.”

“You know, sometimes I think it was your colorful use of expletive that won me over,” Marcone chuckled, leaning in to kiss me again.

 

The phone call to fancy-pants Carolinus was a _joy_ , since I take an unhealthy degree of delight in pulling the pigtails of superhumanly powerful creatures. The only problem with that hobby, of course, is the part where they then turn around and try to squash me like bug, which is significantly less fun. This was practically a birthday present, because I got to get him all worked up and then point him at someone else. 

I got a secretary when I called—sorry, _executive assistant_ —who sounded as though she’d started life as a phone sex operator and only slightly moved up in the world. 

“Hi, can I talk to Boss Cary?” I asked brightly. “I’d like to put in an anonymous tip.”

There was a brief pause, in which she evidently decided to go with the standard script. 

“May I have your name please?” she asked.

“Nope, I don’t think you may. That wouldn’t be much of an anonymous tip, now would it? Put me through to your boss.”

I wished I could have seen her sour-lemon expression at that. “I’m afraid I’ll need your name, sir,” she insisted again. 

“And I’m afraid you’re going to stay in suspense. Seriously though, I think this is a call he’d want to take.”

“If you’d care to leave a message, I can see that it reaches him.”

“Sure. Tell him that his kid in Chicago is being blackmailed by a rogue member of the wardens, under a silencing spell, and possibly being used to engineer a blood feud with the Raiths.”

In the dead silence that followed, I started humming “Tainted Love.” 

“Sir,” she managed at last, sounding strangled. “If you would be so kind as to hold, I believe I might be able to put you through to Lord Borlais.” 

“Well, why didn’t you just say so?”

I hadn’t even finished humming my way to the second round of _dun-duns_ before the phone was snatched up again, and a sharp voice that trickled down my spine like ice water demanded: 

“What is the meaning of this?”

“Just what it sounds like. A dude named Attenborough dropped a silence on your boy Jonathan and has been using him to do his dirty work.”

There was a long, dangerous silence. “Why should I believe this is anything but a transparent ploy to pit me against the White Council?” 

“Well, why don’t you call Jonathan and see what he _doesn’t_ say about it?”

“I believe I will.”

And the line went dead. I replaced it on the handset and waited. It took all of three minutes for him to call back. Apparently he was quite familiar with *69, hah. 

“Am I to understand this is the apparently not-so-deceased Harry Dresden?” he asked without preamble.

“The one and only.”

“And my progeny has contracted your assistance to free him from this spell?”

“Indirectly.” Since actually it had been Tabby, at Jonathan’s behest, who—yeah.

“Few wizards are willing to consort with the White Court,” he observed after a moment’s considered silence.

Enjoyable as it might have been, it probably wasn’t politic to tell him that a White Court vampire was feeding my cat and eating all my potato chips right now. “Yeah, well, I just gotta be different.” 

“They say you’re a maverick.”

“Really? Why, that’s the sweetest thing ‘they’ve’ ever said about me. Usually it can’t be repeated on TV.”

He ignored me. “By what means did you acquire this information?” His tone said that he was clearly used to being obeyed. We really did seem to be having two separate conversations, only tangentially related. 

“Did ‘they’ also happen to mention that I’m also somewhat of a detective? Got my decoder ring from a cereal box and everything.”

Blank silence. 

I sighed. “Aaaand another pop culture reference lost on an immortal. I swear, every time that happens, a Disney pop star loses her inhibitions.” 

He remained silent for a moment, then said mildly, “It will be interesting to see how your zeitgeist-dependent sense of humor endures the test of time, _wizard_ . ” He said that distastefully, as if he’d substituted it at the last minute for a less civil word. “Very well, then. Since I assume you didn’t bring this to my attention out of the goodness of your heart—what is it that you want in return?” 

“Backup,” I said bluntly. “I know how to find this guy. And I’m going to take his ass out, but I think it’d be really cool if I didn’t have to do it by myself.”

Carolinus swiftly considered that. “This Attenborough, he is operating out of Chicago?” 

“Seems like.”

“That’s not an area where I hold particular sway,” he said with faux regret, a show of reluctance but with _“…unless you could make it worth my while”_ coming through loud and clear in the subtext. 

“Then I guess you’d better talk to Lara and see if you can come to an agreement,” I suggested. “I’ve got her number if you need it.”

“That won’t be necessary. I assure you, we know how to keep in _touch_ with our own,” he finished with a low murmur that left me dry-mouthed and vexed.

“Better get on with it, then,” I snapped, and hung up on him.

Stupid sexy vampires. I adjusted my pants as best I could and sat there annoyed for a minute. Then it occurred to me to go see if Marcone was off the phone, and if so, whether he might be amenable to, well... helping. 

As it turned out, he was. 

 

Which is why we were enthusiastically naked when the phone—that godawful, clattering phone—rang again half an hour later. 

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I groaned, the action screeching to a halt like a whistle had been blown.

“Are you going to get that?” Marcone asked, showing remarkable sangfroid at the interruption, and also a remarkable ability to multitask.

“Do I have to?” I asked plaintively, having to raise my voice over another eardrum-splitting ring.

“One of us does,” he said reasonably.

“Oh for—” I ground out a sigh and crawled across him to pick up the headset. “Yeah?” I snapped, trying not to sound like I was breathing hard.

“I seem to have interrupted you mid-coitus,” came a waspish female voice. It took me a longer moment to place it as Lara Raith, and then her words caught up to me and I screwed up my face in chagrin. “I am _so_ glad that I was able to cause you at least a pale shadow of the inconvenience that you’ve caused me.”

I sighed and flopped over onto my back. “Hi Lara. How’d you get this number?” 

“Lord _Carolinus Alberic Borlais_ gave it to me,” she enunciated with icy fury. “When he called to inform me that he was coming to Chicago, but you already know all about that, don’t you?”

“I’m so glad to hear from you too,” I said sarcastically. “I always knew you cared.”

“In your characteristically hamfisted way,” she seethed in a tone that had probably long since sent her assistants scrambling for cover, “you have given the Borlais the excuse they’ve been seeking for _decades_ to come sniffing around my territory.”

“Don’t you mean your father’s territory?” I inquired innocently, then held the phone off so it wasn’t in my ear when she proceeded to scream at me.

“ _Don’t fuck with me,_ Harry Dresden!”

Marcone, who’d been listening with amused interest, winced sympathetically. Then, apparently deciding that sexy fun times weren’t going to be resuming any time soon, rolled away to look for his trousers again while Lara continued to rail at me over the phone. 

“Carolinus Borlais, Lord of the White Shadows _himself_ is going to be here, and the exquisite balance of power that I have been orchestrating since my father’s... _incapacitation_ is going to be _severely jeopardized._ ”

Ouch. I admit, I hadn’t thought of that. It was the worst-kept secret among the Chicago White Court that Lord Raith, Lara’s father, was essentially impotent (courtesy of my mother’s death curse, go team Dresden) and being kept around as a figurehead by his oldest and singularly most ruthless daughter. She’d fended off power plays from other White Court houses before, but I hadn’t given her much in the way of advance notice this time. 

“Oh,” I said. “So what did you agree to do?”

“ _GRANT HIM AN AUDIENCE WITH MY FATHER,_ ” she practically roared, her temper finally breaking. Her voice had taken on a weird, glassy reverberation that sounded like a trick of the phone line but wasn’t. “At which point he might, just _might_ notice that the White King has about as much power as a cat’s turd and, oh—I wonder what Lord Borlais might feel emboldened to do then? Dresden, what _the fuck_ possessed you to think that giving the Borlais an engraved _fucking_ invitation to Chicago was a good idea?”

“Alright, alright, I get it!” I pressed a hand to my temples. Stars and stones, you’d think I’d handed him the keys to Chateau Raith and told him to help himself to the fridge. “He’s coming here because one of his own is getting yanked around by a wizard—”

“Yes, he intimated as much,” Lara bit out.

“— _which means_ , even by your rules, that it’s his right and his responsibility to deal with it. If he kicked it over to your people, that would make it look like he couldn’t handle it himself and he might as well put up a big sign saying, ‘Hey everybody, come get a piece of the Borlais, because we’re a bunch of wusses who—’”

“Yes, yes, and how exceedingly tragic that would be for him,” she said impatiently. “You’re not incorrect, but the consequences of rival clans in close quarters are often... explosive, and this time it will be entirely your fault.”

I frowned. If she was right about this, and the Borlais coming to town was going to herald some sort of (really sexy) gangland turf war, then this might well be going exactly as Attenborough had planned. 

“You realize you’re being set up for this, right?” I asked, then gave a brief recap of what I suspected Attenborough had been angling for with the White Court. Because if there’s one thing that White Court vamps like less than following someone else’s explicit orders, it’s finding out that they’ve been duped into playing right along with someone else’s plan.

Lara was silent when I finished. 

“So you’ll be on your best behavior, right?” I pushed, hoping that pride would be enough to keep both of them in line. “I’ll make sure Carolinus knows it too.”

“You still owe me one very, _very_ large favor,” she warned at last, her tone dire.

“I do not,” I snorted. “Oh please, Lara—you expect me to believe that you didn’t have a plan B ready? You knew this charade with your father wasn’t going to last forever.”

There was a long pause, and when she spoke again, the anger was gone as quickly as if she’d flipped a switch. “Yes, well. You still owe me for having to accelerate my schedule. And for the manicure that I ruined in a fit of pique after receiving an unexpected phone call from Lord Borlais.” 

“Not my problem. I’d chip in for your anger management classes, though.”

“Oh, Harry,” she purred. “My... _anger_ isn’t what needs managing.”

“Hanging up now,” I informed her, and put the phone away with her low, amused laughter still sending shivers down my spine.

 

The rest of the evening passed uneventfully, which my overactive imagination couldn’t help suggesting was the calm before the storm. Marc one had gone downstairs and started dinner, some kind of pasta with vegetables. I still couldn’t get over how he could actually cook—no muss, no fuss, and nothing effeminate about it, just something else that I had trouble wrapping my head around the idea of John Marcone doing. He rolled his eyes when I said as much, mostly in good humor but with a touch of exasperation. 

“Sometimes, Mr. Dresden, I find it a minor miracle that you’ve managed to survive as long as you have, even without taking into consideration the numerous supernatural threats to your health and safety.”

“You and me both,” I agreed. I’d found some barbecue-flavored potato chips in the pantry and was now sitting at the table and systematically ruining my appetite, or so Marcone said. I’d told him it was an appetizer.

“If that’s any indication of how you feed yourself when left to your own devices, I’m surprised you haven’t keeled over from either starvation or malnutrition before now.”

“Might have happened once or twice,” I said sheepishly.

“I rest my case.”

“Sorry, not all of us have the time to learn how to be _gourmet chefs._ ” I crunched my chips at him loudly.

Marcone looked amused, tossing spices and whatnot into the sauce with the careless aplomb of people who are comfortable enough with cooking to scorn accurate measurements. “This is hardly gourmet,” he said dryly. “Though I’m not surprised that you can’t tell the difference, considering how you seem to attach that label to anything that doesn’t come out of a styrofoam cup.” 

“Hey now,” I warned him. “Ramen is the breakfast of champions.”

“And the lunch and the dinner?” he inquired guilelessly, _totally_ stealing my punchline.

“Damn straight,” I grumbled, lacking anything else.

A few minutes passed in companionable lack of conversation, the kitchen filled with the small noises of cooking, water boiling and the fan over the stove running, Marcone at the cutting board casually dicing carrots and somehow making it sexy. 

“So how’d you learn to cook, anyway?” I asked when curiosity got the better of me. 

“My grandmother taught me when I was a kid,” Marcone replied easily.

“Oh,” I said, feeling oddly disconcerted. “That’s... nice.”

Which was lame, but better than the other two responses that popped to mind—one, that it must be nice having a grandmother, not that I would know, which sounded like I was fishing for sympathy, or the other, that I really, really couldn’t picture Marcone in the Norman Rockwell-esque image that evoked, an apple-cheeked little boy hanging around the kitchen and helping his grandmother cook. 

But apparently I couldn’t help probing at that old hurt, because the next thing I knew I was asking, “Were you close? To your grandmother, I mean.” 

“She raised me, Harry. I would say so,” he answered automatically, then it was as if my question caught up with him a beat late because he glanced over at me curiously. “You didn’t know that?”

“No. Why would I?”

He snorted a soft laugh and turned back to the cutting board. “They’ve only managed to work that into every human-interest piece that’s ever been written about me.” 

“Well, I’m sorry to disappoint,” I drawled. “But I haven’t exactly been in your fan club. I don’t go around cutting out your articles and taping them up in my locker.”

“As you shouldn’t. Most of them are either trite and sycophantic, or trite and condescendingly moralistic. And _none_ of them can resist the temptation to play armchair psychologist and theorize about the effect that being raised by women had on me.”

That rang a faint bell, like an article that I’d started to read years ago and thrown down in disgust—I must have found one of the former. Though it made me realize how thoroughly I had attempted (consciously or otherwise) to shut even the mention of Marcone out of my life, as I seemed to be the last person on the planet getting the Cliffs Notes of his childhood. 

The expression on my face must have said as much, because he gave me another look of mild surprise. “You really didn’t know that?” 

“No. I’m also the slackass who never did the assigned summer reading.”

“I see. Well, my father worked in the Ford factory, but he died when I was nine—killed by some over-enthusiastic local muscle, probably courtesy of the Vargassis, who were there to break up a strike he’d helped organize,” Marcone said matter-of-factly. “After that, my mother moved back in with her parents, and since she was always working it fell mostly to my grandmother to take care of me.”

Huh. I’d known that he held an unexpected soft spot for unions; Murphy had mentioned it in passing a time or two (though usually followed with “...he just knows how badly it plays on camera to turn the water cannons on workers picketing with their kids”). I guess that explained it. 

“I never knew any of my grandparents,” I admitted, since apparently we were sharing. “Although my mentor, Ebenezar, was probably a lot like a grandfather to me.”

And a father, and a parole officer, and a thesis adviser, and a crotchety neighbor who subjected me to lectures about young people these days who didn’t have the stamina and moral fortitude to get up at four o’clock in the morning to milk cows or whatever. 

“He’s the one who taught you how to use your magic?” Marcone asked, shutting off the burner and going to dig around in the cupboards until he found a colander.

“He’s the one who taught me to use it _right_ ,” I replied, not without bitterness. “My first mentor was... well, let’s just say that he wasn’t one of the good guys and leave it at that. The only thing I’ve tried to take away from him is how _not_ to be.”

Marcone was giving me that look again as he leaned against the counter and waited for the pasta to drain, the appraising look he got whenever he learned something new about me and was taking a moment to file it in his mental encyclopedia of Dresden. 

When he spoke, all he said was, “I think you succeeded,” before turning back to the dinner preparations, though I got the feeling that there had been more on his mind. 

I also didn’t feel like Marcone was the best person to judge that, but before I could say so, or ask what he’d been about to say instead, he was standing in front of me and handing me a bowl. 

We took it out into the living room to eat in front of the TV. Marcone’s cooking turned out to be really good, and I privately thought he was selling himself short—that if you slapped it on a plate with fancier trim it could have passed for gourmet, but it would have sounded like sucking up to say so. 

He’d turned the TV to the local news station, which was generally a disgrace to its name, alternating between kitten-in-a-tree stories and world news that was shamelessly cribbed from the AP, but probably more likely to carry stories that were relevant to his interests. I still had some of that lingering dry-mouthed, muzzy-headed feeling from having napped earlier, the kind of drowsy where you can’t actually sleep but leaves your brain pretty much useless for any heavy lifting. Well-suited for mindlessly watching TV, in other words, so I was fine with it. 

They reported on a local kid winning a national video game competition—who knew that there even _were_ national video game competitions , right?—and funding shortages for an overpass project whose incomplete edifice was blighting the landscape of a modestly affluent west Chicago neighborhood, before running a brief segment on a shootout suspected to be gang-related. 

“Gangland tensions are rising,” a somber, attractive young black woman told the camera against a backdrop of low-income suburbia, “as there continues to be no word from Outfit leader Marcone, who disappeared Friday into Chicago’s criminal justice system after being charged with the murder of a local private investigator.”

And that was it, before they were moving on to a story about an inner-city Girl Scout troop volunteering at a soup kitchen. It would appear that the name of his victim wasn’t even newsworthy, something I griped about as I got up to answer the phone that was ringing. 

It was Carolinus, calling back to tell me that he and the Raiths had come to an agreement and that he would be arriving with his entourage in Chicago tomorrow afternoon. He didn’t volunteer what kind of agreement it was and I didn’t ask, wondering as I hung up what I’d gotten us into. 

“That was our cavalry,” I told Marcone, coming back into the living room and collapsing onto the couch next to him with a heavy sigh. “With any luck, Attenborough won’t know what hit him.”

Knock on wood, of course—I don’t think either of us believed it would actually be that easy. 

Marcone had apparently seen as much of the news as he wanted to see, because the television was muted and when I sat down he passed me the pay-per-view or video-on-demand or whatever guide. “You did say that you got to choose the movie next time.” 

“Is this our second date then?” I asked, opening up the paper to scan the listings. 

“It seems to be the best we’re going to get, for the moment anyway,” Marcone observed. “And it _is_ dinner and a movie.”

“Hmm, same as last time. We must be getting predictable in our old age.” According to the paper there was, in point of fact, a Bond movie available, though I decided to pass it up in favor of something lighter. There had been an abundance of action in my life recently, but a dearth of comedy. I handed the paper back to him. “Here. _Pink Panther_. Make it happen.”

What? It wasn’t like I’d ever had a TV before. 

Marcone knew what he was doing though, flipping through a bunch of menus at a speed I couldn’t follow, and then setting the remote control aside as the film studio logo came up onscreen. 

I debated it with myself for a moment, and then casually moved my arm to drape over the back of the couch behind him. Strictly speaking, it wasn’t such a bold move to put my arm around him, or it shouldn’t have been, considering what we’d already gotten up to, but it was still unfamiliar, this intimacy. It was all new enough that we didn’t have the motions down by rote, weren’t taking these casual liberties of touch for granted yet. 

Marcone shifted when my arm landed behind him, moving himself closer until our hips met, and settling himself more comfortably into the crook of my arm. 

Relationships aren’t just about sexual passion, I thought, though we had that in abundance. They’re also about the quiet moments, and we’d never gotten the chance, until now, to see if we could do those too. 

Sitting there, holding Marcone contentedly at my side as the movie began to roll, I was starting to think that we might. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And for people who are interested, I also wrote a post talking about [friendship and gender issues](http://rassaku.livejournal.com/6334.html) in the Dresden books, the result of a discussion I had with Binz about the argument between Harry and Murphy in this chapter.


	10. Chapter 10

I woke up too early the next morning, bleary and crusty-eyed as I dragged myself to consciousness. Not actively short on sleep, just fuzzy and dull-witted from waking earlier than I was used to. The room was lit a gloomy gray from the window, which either meant that we were in for rain or that I was up before the sun. I pawed my way upright, rubbing at my eyes. 

The night before I had gone to bed alone, since Marcone was still suffering from insomnia and had chosen to remain in front of the TV rather than spend a sleepless night staring at the ceiling, but he was here now. He sat propped up against the headboard next to me, reading a newspaper angled to catch the light. When he saw me coming awake he smiled. 

“Time’sit?” I mumbled unintelligibly, scowling and squinting around for a clock.

“Almost six-thirty.”

Which meant, thanks to the recent daylight savings time, that it was actually more like _five-thirty_ . I collapsed back into the mattress with a sigh. “Too damn early,” I muttered into the pillow. “G’back to bed.” 

I heard Marcone chuckle, followed by the rustle of newspaper as he folded it and set it aside. A moment later he was settling in behind me, his arm sliding over my waist and slipping under my t-shirt. 

“Good morning to you too, sunshine,” he purred.

Profanity would have taken more lucidity than I had, so I just growled. 

“I beg your pardon?” he asked innocently.

Slightly more articulately, I muttered, “Said it figures, you’re a morning person.” 

“And an evening person, and a late afternoon person,” he agreed.

“You are dead to me.”

“I made coffee.”

“Marry me.”

“Not legal in Illinois.”

I snorted. “Right. Because you’d  _never_ do anything _illegal_ .” 

“Perish the thought.” He smoothed the hair from the nape of my neck and pressed his lips to the top of my spine, licking a slow line that caught the cool air. 

I sucked in a surprised gasp, a shiver running down my body. Right—now this I could be convinced to wake up for. I arched against him, hearing his indrawn breath like a groan and feeling his hands tighten on my hips. Yeah okay, maybe I wouldn’t mind mornings so much if they started like this. 

Some time later, we lay sprawled over each other amid the tumbled sheets, Marcone resting with his head against my shoulder and one arm draped over my chest. I could feel his heartbeat slowing where it pressed against my ribs. Our positions had reversed—now I was the one wide awake, while he looked like a lazy cat in the mood for a nap. I wondered how much sleep he’d managed to steal the night before. 

“Looks like it might rain today,” I said, running my fingers through his hair and gazing off at the window. It had grown somewhat brighter, but the light was still muted and colorless.

“Mm,” Marcone agreed, eyes drowsily shut. “Tonight, is what the weather forecast said.”

He looked ready to drop off, more catlike than ever in his indulgent lethargy. His hair was surprisingly soft, glinting where the morning light picked out threads of silver amidst the darker black. It brought back an old memory of my dad, one of the few I had, when he’d started getting gray hairs—I remembered calling his attention to the first one, with all the _adorable_ lack of tact that kids are known for, and I remembered him suggesting that I pull it out for him. Marcone had a few too many for that. 

It was an old pain, thoughts of my father. He’d died when I was six—and for better or worse, never gotten to know the man I had become. All that I had left of him was a hazy memory of a kind face, and a demon’s insinuation that his death had been no accident. I hardly even knew who he was, what kind of man he had been— 

My throat went tight as my thoughts stumbled over an unpleasant realization. I had known Marcone longer than I had ever known my father. 

“ _Harry_ ...” Marcone said, drawing out my name without opening his eyes. “Whatever you’re working yourself into a state over, let it go.” 

I huffed a sigh and flicked his hair over his forehead. “Are you sure you’re not psychic?” I asked, only semi-sarcastically. 

He opened his eyes to crack a smile at me. “I don’t have to be. You are an open book, one with large text and many pictures. Also, you’re pulling on my hair.” 

“Sorry.”

My hand dropped to his cheek, rough with morning stubble, and traced the sharp line of his jaw up to his ear. I’d never noticed it before, but at this close I could see a tiny indention in the lobe, invisible except for a faint shadow. I leaned in to peer at it. “Is your ear pierced?” I asked curiously, pulling at it. 

“Not for a long time.” He yawned “Legacy of the days when I was young and wild and terribly stupid. I had a motorcycle too.”

Try as I might, I couldn’t picture Marcone as young and stupid. I’d met plenty of guys like that during my forays into the world of organized crime, hardscrabble punks as careless with their own lives as they were with everyone else’s, but it was hard to imagine Marcone as one of them. 

“I bet your grandmother loved that,” I said.

That made him laugh, his eyes crinkling at the memory. The morning light washed out the green in them to the color of sage. “The earring or the motorcycle?” 

“Both.”

“Oh, you’d better believe it. Grande dame of the neighborhood, she was, and I was the only one ballsy enough—or dumb enough, take your pick—to go head-to-head with her.” He shook his head, still smiling. “It’s a shame she never got to meet you.”

“You think she’d have liked me?”

He laughed. “Oh hell, no. She’d have hated you. She hated all my girlfriends—no one good enough for her Johnny. It would have been extremely entertaining though.” 

“I am _not_ your girlfriend,” I informed him archly.

He cut a speculative glance downward, where there were no sheets to hide anything. “Yes, I had noticed that,” he agreed after a dry pause. 

“So long as we’re clear.”

I stoked the lobe of his ear again, then let my finger trace upward along the curve of cartilage. I found myself lingering over a small notch there, a slight imperfection, scarcely big enough to be of note. Then I recognized it for what it was. 

“This is the same ear you lost in the fight with the Denarians, isn’t it?” I asked.

I’d almost missed it; thanks to the miracles of modern medicine, the only evidence left was the slight, depressed seam of a diagonal scar, subtle enough that you wouldn’t even see it if you weren’t looking. 

“Yes.”

“I’m surprised you got it repaired,” I said. “I wouldn’t have expected you to go for that sort of vanity.”

He frowned and brushed my hand off his ear self-consciously. “It’s not a matter of vanity.” 

“Oh?”

“My PR manager bullied me into it. She said she’s already fighting an uphill battle to promote the image of me as a businessman rather than a criminal, and the least I can do to make her job easier is not to walk around looking like a pugilist.” He gave a hard, ironic smile. “Respectable businessmen aren’t in the habit of getting parts of their anatomy bitten off, you know.”

“Ah. I see.”

His chest rose as he drew in a breath and then he sat up, rubbing a hand over his hair. “Although whether I am, in fact, a respectable businessman is philosophy for another day. We need to be getting up and ready soon.” 

“Big day ahead?” I asked, disappointed but resigned to it.

“As always.” He swung his feet off the bed and grabbed a shirt. “I’m going to start breakfast. Coffee’s downstairs if you want it.”

I stayed there for a while after he left, not sleepy but still lazy and reluctant to move. I wouldn’t have minded a lie-in that morning, even though it would have been wasting time that we couldn’t afford. Someday, _someday_ the world would get bored of throwing crises at me and I’d have time to kick back and relax and learn to cross-stitch or do whatever wizards with free time did, but that day was not going to be today. I got up. 

After taking a shower, I went downstairs to find Marcone in the kitchen, already dressed in jeans and a black t-shirt, eating toast and speaking to someone on the phone.

“—yeah,” I heard him say when I came in. I couldn’t tell who he was talking to, but his posture was loose and relaxed where he leaned back against the counter, and he gave a silent smile when he saw me. “Yeah, there are a few things I need to take care of in person... no, probably not. I’ll be in later, maybe an hour and a half... Alright. So if you could come by around eleven, there are some things I need to give you... no, I think it’s best if we don’t arrive at the same time—I’m trying to keep a low profile, and you’re rather... conspicuous.”

Ah, so it was Hendricks, I surmised, poking around on the counter to see what was available for breakfast. A henchman the size of a tank—and with a face that looked like a threat about what he could do to yours—wasn’t the best partner for covert operations, no.

My attention was waylaid when Marcone slid a hand across the small of my back, slipping his fingers just inside the waistband of my jeans and pulling me over to settle me between his legs. I was perfectly willing to be pulled and let my hands rest on his hips, though I would have balked at anything further while Hendricks was still on the phone. The man may not have been a Mensa candidate, but I was convinced that he had a sixth sense, much as dogs do, for detecting my proximity to his boss, and I didn’t want to give him any excuse to come over here and kick my ass.

But Marcone was content just to have me there while he wrapped up the conversation—though the first thing he did after the phone clicked off was to hook a finger over the neckline of my shirt and pull me down for a lazy, unhurried kiss.

“You smell good,” he remarked when the kiss broke, leaning in to sniff my shoulder.

“You look good,” I said honestly. And then, before the conversation could become any more mind-bogglingly saccharine, I looked to the food and asked, “So what’d you make me?”

Marcone looked over his shoulder at the minor mess on the counter. “Toast, if you want it. There are three types of jam in the fridge, along with yogurt, oranges, and sausage in the freezer if you’d like to fry some up.”

“What, no omelets?” I asked in mock dismay. “What happened to the man I married?”

This, as I once again forgot that those jokes only served to embarrass me at least as much as him, if not more. Marcone, of course, just got that gleam in his eye while I felt my face heat up.

“My apologies,” he said smoothly. “I forgot that the way to court you is with food.”

“ _Court_?” I echoed, trying to shake the sudden and horrifying mental image of John Marcone going to my father-figure—in this case, Ebenezar—and formally requesting permission to _court_ me.

“Come now, what do you think Friday was all about?” Marcone said reasonably, giving me a pat on what could have arguably been either my hip or my ass, then gently disentangled our legs so that he could wander out into the living room.

“It was about you getting close enough to steal some of my hair for the golem?” I sputtered as soon as I found a response.

“I told you, all that was changed was the timing,” he called back. “In any case, we don’t have time for omelets this morning. I have to go down to my office for a few hours to deal with some business—and the earlier the better, to avoid running into people I’d rather not see.”

I grabbed a piece of toast that Marcone had made, probably for himself, and followed him into the living room. “I don’t think you want to run into _anybody,_ ” I warned as he disappeared up the stairs. “As soon as you show your face down there, someone’s going to call the cops and they’re going to be all over you.” I took a bite of toast, then swallowed it down to raise my voice and call after him, “And just FYI, I’m not going to be party to busting your ass out of jail if you get caught again!”

He said something in reply, but I didn’t catch it.

“What?”

I still couldn’t hear it, so I went back into the kitchen to dig through the fridge. It was, as Veda had promised, well-stocked. I regretfully passed over the sausage in the interests of time, but put together a pretty good breakfast a la carte. 

“I said that I wouldn’t expect you to,” Marcone replied when he emerged into the kitchen a few minutes later. “And as you can see, I am taking _some_ precautions.”

For a split second I didn’t recognize the man. His eyes were obscured with a pair of sporty, mirrored sunglasses and he’d put on a loose hoodie with the Green Bay Packers logo emblazoned across the chest, topping the ensemble with a knit ski cap. It wasn’t that much, but something in his manner had also changed, his posture a little looser, his walk more like a saunter. It made him seem much younger, and did the trick as effectively as a bag over his head.

“You look like a high school football coach,” I said judgmentally, but even I would admit that I could have passed him on the street without recognizing him. 

He crossed to stand in front of the stove, critically examining his reflection in the metal backing. “As long as I don’t look like John Marcone.”

“Well, as disguises go it’s not bad, but taking a potion would be guaranteed. We have plenty left, you know. Even looking like that, someone at your office is likely to recognize you.”

He flashed me a un-football-coach-like smile from behind the glasses. “I’m counting on it. And I’m counting on them to tell people they thought they saw me, and for no one to be sure whether to believe it or not. At this point, it’s in my best interests to keep everyone guessing.”

“Yeah, which is going to be a great comfort when people start shooting at us the moment they lay eyes on you.”

“Ah.” Marcone took off the glasses and slipped them into his pocket, his tone warning me that I wasn’t going to like what I heard next. “You realize you’re not coming with me, right?”

I blinked. “What? Don’t be stupid, you’ve got the Black Council gunning for you.”

“They have no reason to expect me at my office and every reason to believe that I’m dead,” he pointed out rationally, then leveled me with a look. “Moreover, _I_ have every reason to keep you as far away as possible from certain other spheres of my life.”

I was stung. “Marcone. You don’t think I would...” I made a vague gesture, thinking of the times I’d blown up various of his establishments, though my hand-waving probably didn’t convey that.

“I don’t think you would like it,” he said simply. After a moment he relented, coming over to rest his hands on my hips. “Harry, this relationship is going to require enough willful blindness on your part already, I think, and I’d rather not put it to the test any sooner than I have to.”

I didn’t answer immediately, though he was right. We both knew I didn’t like his business, and the less I was reminded of that, the longer this would last—though willful blindness wasn’t an idea that sat particularly well with me either.

So I took the procrastinator’s route and set it aside to deal with later, choosing now to scowl at his hat.

“That hat is hideous, by the way,” I informed him. “You have far too much dignity for that hat.”

“Oh?”

“I cannot, in good conscience, date a man who would wear a hat so ugly.”

“I’m devastated,” he said, though his eyes were laughing. “My delicate ego may never recover.”

“And you’re trying to distract me,” I said. “From the fact that you’re heading into danger without backup.”

His smile faded. “We both lead dangerous lives, Harry,” he reminded me, his voice mild but making it clear that this was not up for debate. “You more than me, I suspect, since you show an idiot’s disregard for your own safety. But there are hazards in my line of work as well, and I am not one of your female acquaintances to be coddled and cloistered. You’re going to have to get used to that.”

Jerk. He could at least appreciate the sentiment.

“Well,” I said, feeling grumpy. “Be careful, then.”

He nodded. “Always. Though before I abscond with our only vehicle, I believe you had some errands to run as well—picking up the materials from your house to run the tracking spell on Mr. Williams?”

“Not picking up anything. I want to run it from my workshop. I guess if you drop me off at my place, I can get my brother to give me a ride back when I’m done. He’s been house-sitting for me while I’ve been running around with you.”

“And what time are our West Coast friends arriving?”

Who—oh right, the Borlais. I’d almost forgotten about them. “We’re supposed to meet them at the airport around four-thirty.”

He nodded again. “Alright. Then if I’m going to conclude my affairs in time to join you, we need to leave soon. I’m ready to go when you are.”

Which even I could translate as a polite _hurry your ass up_. I bit back a sigh and jammed the rest of the toast into my mouth, motioning for him to lead the way. Someday I would get the chance to slow down and catch my breath, but not today.

 

I had Marcone drop me off a couple blocks from my apartment and walked the last leg under a veil, keeping a sharp eye out for traps—more out of paranoia than because of any real reason to expect them. I didn’t live in the best of neighborhoods, but my brother’s new car was sitting unmolested at the curb, possibly because it looked like a Batmohummer that could take your hand off for touching it. 

I let myself in and found Thomas sprawled out on my couch, Mister sitting on his stomach to provide ballast, eating Skittles and watching something dramatic and laden with X-chromosomes on Lifetime. The TV was a bit of a surprise, since I hadn’t had one last I checked.

“Thomas, did you forget that you’re just faking the gay, or did all those bleach fumes finally go to your head?”

I shucked off my shoes in the hallway and slung my coat over the back of the couch that he occupied. Mister didn’t move, taking it as his due that I had returned to feed him again, but Mouse, at least, was gratifying happy to see me, and I scratched him on the head as I passed through the living room.

“Did you know that Lifetime has a higher BPH ratio than Spike TV?” Thomas countered somewhat vaguely.

“BPH?”

“Breasts per hour.”

I snorted. “Right. Because TV is the only way that _you_ could ever hope to catch a glimpse of boobs.”

I left Thomas where he was and went directly down into the basement to get to work. I had already decided that it would be a spectacularly bad idea just to follow Jonathan outright, since—depending on how tight Attenborough’s security was—that sounded like a great way to get caught flat-footed and _sans_ backup. Fortunately, there was a better way to do it.

I had a model in my workroom that I called Little Chicago, a painstakingly-detailed diorama of the city that I had been working on for months. And I wasn’t doing this just for my own entertainment—the model was augmented throughout with actual pieces of the city, a chip of pavement here and a twist of grass there, which allowed me to act on the miniature as if it were the city itself. It wasn’t entirely finished, but I had the main thoroughfares in place, along with all of the important landmarks and a lot of the lesser ones as well. That’s what I was going to use to find Jonathan.

The smear of blood that he’d given me on the card would have been hard to track under normal circumstances, since blood works best when it’s fresh and there couldn’t have been more than a few drops’ worth of it, but Little Chicago was approximately one-billionth the size of the real thing, and so a drop of blood was correspondingly more potent. Or so the theory went, anyway.

It was weird being down there without Bob’s snarky commentary for a backdrop, and twice I caught myself trying to talk to him out of force of habit. Thomas came down after a while to see what I was up to, evidently bored with television.

“You know, Harry,” he remarked after watching me at work for a minute. “If you want to play with toy cars, I would totally spring for Hot Wheels. You don’t have to play with the crappy off-brand.”

“I am not playing,” I replied through gritted teeth, where I was holding a pair of tweezers in my mouth while I prepared the avatar for the spell. Which, yeah, was a sad and battered little toy Volkswagon. It had been a gag gift from Murphy once upon a time (and I quote: “You need a new car, but this is the best I can afford on my current salary”), but after being co-opted by Mouse for use as a chew toy, its condition had deteriorated until it pretty much matched the real thing. It didn’t have the best resonance with Jonathan, thaumaturgically speaking, but it was considerably more mobile than a Ken doll.

“That’s good. Because if you were, I’d expect you to be having more fun. So then what _are_ you doing?”

“Setting up a spell to track someone. The White Court guy I told you about yesterday—turns out he’s not exactly working for the bad guys willingly, but he does seem to be close to the heart of their operation. I’m hoping that following him will lead us directly to their base.”

Thomas nodded. “Good plan.”

I ended up cutting the largest bloodstain on the card into two pieces—it ought to be enough to run the spell, and this way I had two chances to get it right. With the tweezers I delicately affixed the piece of card onto the hood of the toy car, and then set the car down in the middle of Little Chicago.

“ _Qaero_ , chariot” I told it, giving it a push. It rolled a few inches and then gave a sudden jerk as the spell took effect, spinning on its little wheels and trundling off purposefully of its own volition. I had to help it around corners, since the parameters of the spell pulled it directly to Jonathan’s location but weren’t sophisticated enough to navigate streets. After a few false starts it came to a halt against the law office where we’d ambushed him yesterday—Monday morning, of course he was at work.

“Well,” I said, stepping back from my handiwork. “I don’t expect he’ll be moving again any time soon. Which gives me time to rally my troops.”

“Do you need my help?” Thomas asked in all seriousness.

I hesitated. Thomas was a good man in a fight, but I already had White Court vampires out the wazoo for this operation. And moreover, I didn’t want to put anyone else I cared about in danger.

“Yeah,” I said slowly. “I need someone to watch this and call me when it moves. You think you can do that?”

Thomas raised one eloquent eyebrow that said he knew exactly what I was doing. “A tough job, but someone’s got to do it, huh?” he asked dryly.

“Pretty please, for your favorite little brother?” I attempted a puppy-dog smile, which undoubtedly wasn’t half as effective as his smiles were when he wanted something.

“You realize you’re also my _least_ favorite little brother,” Thomas pointed out, but he wasn’t really arguing. “Yeah, okay, I can do that for you. I might drag the TV down here though.”

“Speaking of, where’d the TV even come from?” I asked as we climbed the ladder back upstairs.

“Your neighbor lent it to me,” he said, flashing a devilish smile that was probably the exact one he’d used on my hapless neighbor. “Nice lady. So try not to break it, yeah?”

I rolled my eyes. Thomas could charm the pants off a brick wall when he put his mind to it, and like an obnoxious older brother he had to rub it in, veritably preening as he settled himself back down on the couch.

After a moment’s consideration, I decided that nothing demanded my immediate attention and wandered into the kitchen to get myself a drink. Jonathan wasn’t likely to be going anywhere until this evening at the earliest, and Marcone was still off taking care of mob business that I was probably happier not knowing about. The best thing for me to do was try to relax for a bit.

Thomas, with his inexplicable preference for Diet Mountain Dew ( _and how_ , it’s not like he needed to watch his calorie intake) had staged a coup in my icebox, but I managed to find an unmolested Coke in the back.

“Aspartame shrinks your testicles, you know,” I informed him tartly, coming back into the living room. 

“I have no idea what you’re talking about, and I’m probably happier that way,” he replied, utterly serene. “So, how’s being dead treating you, Harry?”

“I could be deader, I suppose.” I sighed, settling into the armchair and leaning back. Or trying to, anyway—the reclining mechanism only worked about half the time, and even then only under extreme duress. I managed to kick it a couple times until it folded back, and then recapped the last couple days for Thomas. Well, the relevant bits anyway. Or everything that he wouldn’t wolf-whistle or ask embarrassing questions at.

“So Lara read you the riot act, huh?” he asked when I was done.

“Yeah, but I don’t think she’s as put out as she was playing up. I think she just wanted to make me feel guilty so she’d have some leverage over me in the future.”

He nodded, his sculpted brow set in a troubled frown. “That’s fully possible. However, it’s also possible that Carolinus is going to start a civil war.”

“What’s the deal with him anyway? Lara handled it just fine when what’s-his-name, the Skavis, tried to pull a fast one. Why’s this guy any different?”

Thomas snorted, his expression contemptuous. “The Skavis are bottom-feeders,” he said with a dismissive wave. “They always have been. But the Borlais used to be part of the Raith. I’m not sure of the details, because it all happened long before I was born, but from what I’ve gathered, about a hundred years ago Carolinus tried to stage a coup and seize the White Throne for himself. It didn’t succeed, of course—my father smacked him down, and Carolinus wisely took himself and his followers off to California to discourage retribution. Out of sight, out of mind. They’ve toed the line ever since, and so yeah, while we never entirely forgot about them, they’ve fallen a few notches on the threat ranking.”

“I see.”

“However, when Lord Borlais meets my father, he’ll be able to tell immediately that Lord Raith has no power to speak of. It’s level odds on whether he’ll acknowledge Lara as the de facto replacement and conduct his affairs with her instead, or whether he’ll treat it like a power vacuum that wants filling. I don’t think you understand just how risky a move it was, inviting the Borlais to Chicago. I hope it was worth it.”

I sighed and scrubbed my hands over my hair. “I think so, yes. I’d like all hands on deck for this, because Attenborough has been pulling everyone’s strings, and no one takes kindly to that. The more people in the room who want to murder him until he’s dead, the greater odds that someone’s going to succeed. The only problem is that if we alert too many people, word might slip that we’re onto him—at which point he’ll probably go to ground, leaving us with no way to find him, and we’re right back to where we started.”

“Mmm.” Thomas took a sip of his vile beverage. “I see your dilemma.”

“So you never knew that one of them was living in Chicago?” I asked. “It seems like a vamp from a rival family putting down roots in your turf is something that the Raith would keep a weather eye on.”

Thomas shrugged. “I’m sure Lara knew he was there, but if he’s latent, he’s latent. Practically speaking, he hardly counts as a member of the White Court at all.”

“You know, I was wondering about that, actually—I got the impression from his wife that he was estranged from his family, but then it turns out that he still gets regular visits from the Borlais patriarch, and he doesn’t seem to bear them any grudge. And Carolinus was quick enough to leap to Jonathan’s defense when he found out that a wizard was screwing with him.”

“Ah,” Thomas said, raising his eyebrows significantly. “But was that purely out of family feeling, or because it gave him the excuse he wanted to scout out Chicago?”

“Point taken.”

“Still, I understand what you’re asking. And the general sentiment toward latent incubi is rather... ambivalent. The word for them is _thafa—_ it’s difficult to translate. It means ‘cursed’ but also means ‘to squander.’ As in, they’ve squandered the gifts that they were given as vampires. Older and more conservative members of the White Court, like my father or Lord Borlais, simply don’t understand why anyone would possibly prefer it to being full-blooded—they don’t know what it means to be in love, so to them it seems like throwing away the proud and powerful heritage of the White Court for nothing. Lara’s mostly in their camp, but she’s at least canny enough to recognize that for some people, love is unavoidable and the best option may be letting them go latent.” He grimaced. “That’s why she was willing to let Inari elope with her porn star boyfriend. I assure you, if my father had still been the one in control, there’s no way Inari would have been allowed to do that. Even if she’d somehow managed to beat the odds and become _thafa_ on her own, he would have had her disinherited at the very least, possibly even killed.”

“Wow.” I took a sip of cola. “Way to be progressive.”

“Tell me about it. Anyway, if Lord Borlais is still on speaking terms with Jonathan, then he must be at least a little more liberal than my father, though I can’t imagine he’s thrilled with it.”

“So basically,” I summarized. “Jon is the gay grandson that they don’t entirely approve of, but family is family and so nobody gets to fuck with him except them?”

“That’s it in a nutshell.”

“What happens in twenty, forty years from now? Is he going to age like a human, or like a vamp?”

“Like a vampire.”

“So when his wife is eighty years old...”

“He’ll still be a young man, yes.”

“That’s got to be rough.”

“I suppose they’ll cross that bridge when they get to it,” he said with a careless shrug.

It wasn’t much of a leap to guess that his thoughts were on Justine now, and how he didn’t get even that much with her. That wasn’t a subject that either of us wanted to discuss though, so I let the conversation drop off, my eyes drifting to the television, and eventually my thoughts wandered onto more innocuous subjects. 

I’d never really had a TV in the house, and I had to admit it was entertaining. Vaguely hypnotic, and if I had one around all the time I’d probably never be able to walk away from it until I accidentally blew it up, but for the moment it seemed like the perfect way to kill a few hours, since I was at loose ends until Carolinus and his mousketeers arrived.

“She doesn’t seriously think that being such a backstabbing bitch is going to get her the guy, does she?” I asked after watching the show for about twenty minutes. “I mean, I get that she and the redhead are rivals, but doesn’t _he_ get a say in who he’d rather go out with? Or what if he doesn’t like either one of them? Because _I_ don’t. Hell, what if he’s gay?”

“Stop over-analyzing,” Thomas advised. “This is the distaff counterpart to millennia of literature in which the female, lacking any agency of her own, is a prize to be won in a competition between male characters. This is progress, Harry.”

“See, you talk like that and then I start to think that you’re not as dumb as you pretend to be, but then you watch _this_ crap.”

“I notice that you’re watching it too.”

“Yeah. Well. Only because I don’t know how to change it to something different.” Sad, but true.

“It’s called the remote control, and it will change your life,” Thomas began, reaching over to the coffee table when the phone rang. He looked at me expectantly then blinked and sat up. “Oh right, you’re still playing dead. One sec.”

He sauntered into the kitchen and I heard him pick up the receiver. “Hello?” There was a pause and then he asked, in a much warier tone, “Who is this?”

I was on my feet immediately at the change in his manner and half a second later he was pressing the phone into my hands.

“It’s Marcone,” Thomas said, his mouth in a worried line. “He asked for you directly.”

“Marcone?” I said hastily into the phone. “What’s—”

“I seem to have been compromised,” Marcone cut me off sharply. “Someone—”

He broke off abruptly and even over the staticky phone line I could hear two gunshots ring out clearly.

“Marcone!” I shouted, the bottom of my stomach suddenly dropping out with sudden cold, sick fear.

It was an immeasurable relief when he came back a moment later, cursing to make a sailor blush. “—Right, I don’t know how the hell they found me—only two people knew I was coming, but there was a car full of— _fuck—!_ ”

He cut off again and I heard an improbably loud screech of tires followed by multiple horns blaring.

A sudden thought occurred to me, and I felt my heart sink.

“Marcone,” I said again, dreading my next words. “Those two people who knew you were coming... one of them wouldn’t happen to be Helen, would it?”

“Of course,” he snapped, distracted. “She’s my chief executive assistant.”

I put my hand over my eyes, trying to think of a good way to say this and coming up with abso-fucking-lutely nothing. And that silence, of course, told him everything that he needed to know.

“Mr. Dresden,” Marcone said carefully, his voice deadly calm under the circumstances. “Is there something you neglected to tell me?”

“Helen was the one who betrayed you to the Denarians,” I blurted out.

This time the silence was Marcone’s, and it felt far longer than it possibly could have been.

“I’m getting couched for this, aren’t I?” I said at last.

“Dresden, with the firepower currently bearing down on me, where you sleep tonight is frankly the least of my concerns. I will keep you apprised of my situation if I am in any position to do so. Good day.”

“Marcone! Wait, where are you—Marcone!”

If he hadn’t already hung up, then it wouldn’t have made much difference because a half-second later the phone gave a loud, sharp crack and from inside the headset I could hear the sizzle of wires frying, latest victim of Harry Dresden, bane to all things technological. For a moment I just stared at it witlessly, trying to figure out how everything had gone to hell so quickly. Then I swore, made an abortive move to replace it, remembered that it was fubar’d anyway and just flung it at the wall. I’d grabbed my coat off the back of the couch and was halfway to the door before Thomas, who’d managed to grab his keys in the confusion, caught my arm.

“Wait up, Harry, where do you think you’re going?”

“To help Marcone!” I barked, shoving off his hand. “He’s—”

“Yeah, I know, I was right here, remember? But unless I missed something, you don’t know where to find him.”

“He’s—” I fumbled to think rationally, when all of my stupid brain cells were unhelpfully screaming GO-FIND-RESCUE! at me. “Near his office,” I managed to produce. “He has to be somewhere near his office, because if Helen knew he was coming, that’s where she would have told someone to ambush him.”

Oh god, _Helen._ I had known that she was a viper, curled up right and cozy in the middle of Marcone’s operations, and I’d let her stay there. I’d had my justifications, sure, but I had _known_ what she was capable of, and if Marcone died because of her—

 _One of these days, your need-to-know bullshit is going to get someone killed_ , Murphy had said. She didn’t know that it already had, when I’d refused to tell Kim how to protect herself from the loup-garou. Now, I was hoping against hope that history wasn’t going to repeat itself, that I wasn’t about to get a karmic ass-kicking for not having learned my lesson the first time.

“Hey, Harry, keep it together!” Thomas gave me a sharp whack upside the head. “Are we going to go haul your boyfriend’s ass out of the fire or what?”

“Yeah.” I swallowed, forcing away an image of Marcone as I’d found Kim, her face torn away to show the bones beneath. “Yeah,” I repeated, stronger.

“You’re steady enough that you’re not going to blow out my stereo system?”

“To hell with your stereo system, let’s go!” I shouted.

Thomas, to his credit, did as he was told.

There is one thing to be said for Hummers, ozone-destroying gas guzzlers that they are—with a V8 engine and tires built for off-roading, those babies can _move._ Particularly when piloted by a vampire with inhuman reflexes and an insouciant disregard for traffic laws. Thomas got us inside the Loop faster than I would have thought possible, muscling his way through the press of traffic like a whale cutting through minnows.

We were also a head and shoulders above the rest of the cars, which meant as soon as we turned the corner onto LaSalle we had a clear line of sight straight down to the circus of police cars that had stopped traffic in both directions. Thomas quickly sized up his options, and rather than sitting in this gridlock for half an hour to go three blocks, he turned off into a parking lot and pulled some flagrantly illegal maneuvers to get us within a stone’s throw of the police blockade. There were half a dozen cop cars scattered about, along with at least three times as many officers, all flanked by the crowd of rubberneckers that’s as inevitable as death and taxes in these situations.

“Thomas!” I said urgently, bracing myself on the dashboard and trying to see over the blockade. “That’s his car! The car Marcone was driving.”

It was in worryingly bad condition now, I could tell that from just the brief glimpse that I caught of it. It had collided with something head-on; the nose was crumpled in on one side and the windshield was a spiderweb of fractures. I searched the crowd for Marcone, but there were just too many people.

Thomas threw the car into park and killed the engine. I moved to get up and go with him, but he clapped a hand on my shoulder and unceremoniously shoved me back down.

“No, you keep your butt parked right there,” he said bluntly. “If you go in there now, someone’s bound to recognize you and you’ll be stuck getting processed by the CPD for the next six hours. I’ll go talk to them—and hell, you know I’ll have better luck than you would anyway.”

He was right, though I didn’t have to like it, so I grumbled mutinously but sank back down into my seat. Thomas plunked a White Sox cap on my head and then climbed out of the car, adopting a casual stroll as he sauntered over to the blockade. I watched while he made his way up to the front, hands in his pockets as he craned his head to see over the tops of the police cars, just another curious passerby.

Then I watched, with grim amusement, as a female officer on the scene did a literal double-take, her eyes drifting over the crowd once and then her head snapping back around again when her brain caught up with the paragon of masculine perfection standing not six feet away. He said something to her casually, as if he hadn’t noticed the way her eyes had glazed over, and it was obvious that she was all too happy to oblige his questions.

Thomas tends to get that reaction as a matter of course, whether he’s trying or not, and so I’d forgotten the effect he can have when he cranks up the sex appeal _on purpose._ Though if he kept this up for much longer the poor woman wasn’t going to have many brain cells left to do her job with. She was transfixed, smiling at him adoringly while he gestured at the wrecked car over her shoulder. I silently willed him to hurry it the hell up.

Then the spectacle in progress grew even more ridiculous, when a nearby male officer noticed that his coworker was cheerfully giving away police-only information to a civilian, and immediately strode over to put a stop to it. Unfortunately for him, Thomas’s megawatt smile turned and caught him just as quickly, and he froze like a deer in the headlights. The man’s expression was priceless, confused and intrigued and panicked all rolled together. He was visibly considering having a gay epiphany on the spot, and looking alarmed by the prospect. Poor guy—someone should have told him that his current sexual identity crisis wasn’t his fault. Thomas just has that effect on people.

Finally— _finally!_ I was beginning to wonder if Thomas had lost sight of the mission objectives and was angling for a threesome in the backseat of a police cruiser—he excused himself from the besotted duo and made his excruciatingly slow way back to the car.

“Well?” I demanded impatiently as soon as he was back inside. “What’d you find out? Do they know where Marcone is?”

Thomas took a breath, and then blew it out again in a sigh that said I wasn’t going to like the news. “They’ve got nothing,” he said flatly. “They know there was a car chase. They’ve been interviewing witnesses on the scene, but they don’t know that it was Marcone and they don’t know who was chasing him. According to one witness, the other people shot out Marcone’s tires but the cops are pretty sure they weren’t trying to shoot him directly, because after he was forced to stop, they managed to get him surrounded and then hustle him away in one of their cars.”

“Hell’s bloody bells,” I ground out, taking off the cap so I could rake my hands through my hair in frustration. “And now there’s no telling where he might be.”

“I’m sorry, Harry.”

“No,” I cut him off sharply. “No condolences, not yet. Marcone’s a clever bastard, and I refuse to believe that he’s... not going to weasel his way out of this one somehow.”

Think, Harry, _think—_ how do you find Marcone? My first thought went to magic, of course, because that’s the way I roll. If I went back to the safehouse, I was sure I could find a few hairs that I could use to track him, but that was two states away and the trip would take time we couldn’t afford. It occurred to me briefly that I might well have some of his hairs stuck to _my_ clothes somewhere, since we’d practically been living in each other’s pockets for the past couple days, when the more obvious solution hit me.

Helen. 

If she’d sold him out to Torelli, or whoever the hell she’d decided she liked more than Marcone, then she would know where he’d been taken.

“Thomas, get us to Marcone’s office, _now!_ ”

 

It was a testament to Thomas’s appreciation for the severity of the situation that he didn’t even make any wise-ass remarks about going to Marcone’s one-stop-shopping fitness club/brothel, which was to a sex vampire what a candy shop was to the proverbial kid. Although if you were to extend that unfortunate metaphor, it would end up with Thomas as the diabetic kid pressing his nose against the glass from outside. I offered to let him wait outside, knowing it would be hard on him, but he just shook his head tightly and made it clear he wasn’t going to leave me on my own.

My key card—which I kept frying and they kept cheerfully replacing each of the handful of times I’d been here—actually worked this time, a miracle akin to the second coming, and we emerged onto the third floor gym at the height of the lunchtime rush. A quick workout and quick... well, quickie, I thought impolitely as we crossed to the reception desk.

There were three girls there, two of them chatting and folding towels while the third spoke to someone on the phone, all three of them as shiny and perky as barbie dolls fresh out of the box, and wearing what looked like tennis outfits from before the advent of feminism. Their names, according to the glittery pins perched atop chests that had to be comprised of mostly helium, were _Christy_ , _Traci_ , and _Stephanie_ , although I could have sworn that the brunette had gone by a different name the last time I was there.

They saw me coming before I got to the desk. Christy had her service-industry smile pasted on and her mouth open to give me the standard greeting, but I headed her off at the pass.

“Take me to see Helen,” I ordered flatly.

Traci recovered first, rallying her smile again. “I’m sorry, sir, but Ms. Demeter is unavailable at the moment. If you’d like to leave—”

I brought both hands down onto the brushed steel countertop with a sharp bang. All three girls give a small jump and a few other patrons glanced over with curiosity.

“Lady, I have heard that line before and I _know_ it’s bullshit,” I growled. “I don’t have time for these games, so you either have ten seconds to take me upstairs, or I’ll show myself up. And _don’t_ —” 

The third girl, no doubt imagining that she was being very subtle, had started dialing a distress code into the phone but now it gave a violent explosion that nearly knocked it off the desk.

“—even think about calling security on me. I am so not in the mood for that. So what’s it going to be? Are you going to pass this up the line, as I strongly recommend, or do I have to start taking this place apart just to prove that I can?”

To my surprise, the second girl, Traci, chose that moment to take a cautious step forward, rather than the slow step back I would have expected.

“Uhm—you wouldn’t by chance happen to be Mr. Harry Dresden, would you?” she inquired tentatively, something like understanding dawning in her eyes. No sign that she knew I was supposed to be dead, or that her boss had _gone to jail for murdering me_. Maybe she didn’t read the papers. Hell, maybe she couldn’t read at all.

“And if I were?” I asked suspiciously.

All three of them immediately perked up. “Oh!” Traci chirped. “Well, it’s just that if you are, there are procedures in place for how to deal with you. We have instructions to grant you full access to all of our facilities, to show you directly to Mr. Marcone if you request it, and if you vandalize any property or equipment we’re supposed to record it for insurance purposes but not to interfere,” she rattled off brightly.

“ _Vandalize?_ ” I choked out. “Oh come on, that was _one time!_ Okay, maybe two, but... oh for god’s sake.” I ground out an aggrieved sigh and massaged my temples at the incipient pressure gathering there. It was nice to be reminded that even in his absence Marcone could still give me a headache. “Never mind. Just take me to see Helen. Ms. Demeter, whatever.”

“Certainly, sir! And will your...” Christy used the pause to cut a speculative glance at Thomas, “... _friend_ be joining you?”

“Yes, my _friend_ will be. Now get us moving.”

“Right this way, sir,” she said brightly, her relentless good cheer apparently immune to any assault. At least she was moving now, solicitously ushering us into a staff elevator behind the front desk.

The office floor we emerged onto three stories up was significantly quieter than downstairs, with the plush carpeting that I remembered from the previous times I’d been here. Christy preceded us down the hall, hips swinging in a way that would have been diverting if I hadn’t had _so much other shit to worry about_ , and stopped in front of Marcone’s office.

She had lifted her hand to knock but I didn’t give her the time, grabbing the handle and letting myself in directly, ignoring her short cry of dismay.

Helen was sitting behind the desk and working at the computer, angular glasses on her face and her hair pulled back into a severe braid. She looked up when I entered and though her expression didn’t change, her hands on the keyboard froze.

“Hi, Helen,” I said with ruthless false cheer. “Remember me?”

“Mr. Dresden,” she said, flat and slow as though she were buying herself time to think. Without looking at her hands she keyed in a sequence on the computer and then rolled the tray back under the desk as it powered down. Addressing the girl she said, “Thank you, Christy, you may go.”

I heard the door shut behind me, and in my peripheral vision I could see Thomas moving along the edge of the room until we were facing her down from two angles.

“Where’s Marcone?” I asked, since she wasn’t being very forthcoming.

Her eyes flicked once to Thomas, warily, but then she dismissed him and moved her full attention to me. “I must admit, I wasn’t expecting the pleasure of being interrogated by you again.”

“ _Where’s Marcone?_ ” I bit out.

“Why do you care?” she countered without emotion, watching my approach with cold eyes. “He’s a killer and a criminal. Before long he’ll be a dead criminal, which is nothing more than what he deserves.”

I planted my hands on the desk, looming over her as best I could—and topping six and a half feet, I loom pretty well—but she just stared up at me, utterly unintimidated. It wasn’t even defiance in her gaze, it was... nothing.

“Helen,” I said, quiet with menace. “I know you sold him out again, only this time I’m a hell of a lot less inclined to let it slide. Now you’re going to tell me who’s got him and where they’ve taken him, or—”

“Or what, Mr. Dresden?” she interrupted, her tone flat and disinterested. The lines in her face were set and hard, her immaculately professional make-up like armor. And her eyes, behind the metal frames of her glasses, were as cold as a corpse’s. When I didn’t immediately answer, she pushed, “No really, tell me. What exactly are you going to do if I don’t cooperate?”

“I didn’t bring a game plan, but at this point, I’m sure I can think of something,” I said grimly. “I know I’ve got a rep for being a good guy, but lady, this is not the day to be banking on that.”

The scary part was, I meant every word of what I was saying. I was prepared to do _a lot_ that I would regret later, if that was what it took to make her talk.

She leaned back in Marcone’s chair, the better to survey me dispassionately. “So you’ll do what? Torture me? Murder me? Go ahead.” Her eyes searched my face, and I don’t know what she saw, but she shook her head distantly and when she spoke it was as if to herself. “You have nothing to threaten me with. There is nothing you can do to me that I fear.”

Thomas stepped forward and I could feel the air currents thickening as he turned up whatever ineffable energy the White Court used to seduce their prey, but Helen’s expression remained unmoved as she shifted her gaze to him. “And I want nothing that _you_ have to offer, either.”

“Helen, please,” I gritted out, feeling stymied and increasingly desperate. Every minute that ticked by was making it less and less likely that our rescue, when it came, would get to him in time. “Marcone’s taken care of you for years. Remember that? That he was the one who gave you respect and a decent job when nobody else would hire a convicted felon?”

“And that he was the one my daughter took a bullet and died for?” she supplied conversationally.

I froze, for once stunned out of any quick and witty retort. Because... what? She _knew?_ Since when? Had Marcone finally told her? But then...

At the gobsmacked look on my face she smiled, the expression ghastly and false. “Oh yes, you thought I didn’t know. _He_ thought I didn’t know. He would have liked me to believe that he provided for me out of the goodness of his heart, not from some misguided attempt to purge himself of the guilt of my daughter’s death.”

My mouth had fallen open in astonishment, but now I shut it, thinking furiously about the one option that was still left to me. Marcone wouldn’t be happy about it, but that paled in comparison to what could happen if we didn’t get to him soon.

“Your daughter isn’t dead,” I said quietly.

Helen’s eyes narrowed and it was a long time before she answered. “I don’t know what you’re playing at,” she said at last, and the tremor in her voice could have been anger or grief or both. “But this joke is in poor taste.”

“It’s not a joke. Your daughter isn’t dead. She’s in the hospital and has been for ten years, but Marcone’s been providing for her treatment. I can tell you where she is.”

She didn’t move. In the silence that followed I could hear her uneven breaths, could see her white-knuckled grip on the armrests and the high spots of color on her otherwise ashen face. Her gaze was fixed and hungry, starved as her soul had been for hope all these years, and I almost felt a twinge of guilt for failing to tell her the whole of it.

“ _You’re lying_ ,” she choked out, her voice strangled.

I spread my arms, my face stony. “Helen, you’ve seen inside my soul. You know what sort of man I am. Would I lie to you about something like this?”

“Where is she?” Helen demanded.

“Where’s Marcone?”

The silence stretched again, broken only by Helen’s strained breathing, and then abruptly she broke eye contact and grabbed a pen and notepad off the desk. She furiously scribbled something down, then tore off the top sheet and thrust it at me.

“There. That’s where Torelli’s base of operations is. I don’t know if that’s where they’ve taken him, but if you’re going to ask questions, they’re the ones likely to have your answers. Now where’s my daughter?”

I took the paper and scanned it in silence. I couldn’t immediately place the address, but that’s what GPS was for.

“Thank you, Helen, you’ve been very helpful,” I said with only a modicum of irony as I tucked it into my pocket and turned to leave. “And I’m sure you have a lot of work to get back to, so we won’t keep you.”

She was on her feet in a heartbeat, naked fear on her face. “You promised!” she cried, furious and stricken.

“So I did,” I agreed. “And if Marcone’s alive when I get to him, I’ll even keep that promise.”

The rage in her eyes should have struck me dead. “ _You—!_ ”

But whatever she was going to call me was lost as Thomas and I left the room and I shut the door behind us. I couldn’t keep from feeling like a dick for the move I’d pulled with Helen, but—and this was the kicker—not enough to make me turn around. Her treachery might have killed Marcone, and I didn’t feel like doing a thing for her.

Thomas and I didn’t speak again until we were back in his car, and he could let out a shaky breath, unwinding the taut rein he’d had to keep over himself while we were in that place.

“Here, plug this into your GPS,” I said, passing him the address. “I’ll try to think small thoughts.”

He took it and began fiddling with the screen on the dashboard. After a few moments of silence he asked, “Do you really know where that woman’s daughter is?”

His tone was mild, but held a note that suggested he would strongly disapprove if the answer was no.

“Yes,” I said shortly, then added, “I’m sure Marcone has his reasons for not telling her.”

“Probably because she’s a sociopath,” Thomas agreed, as if that should be obvious.

I frowned. “You could tell?” I’d always thought that Helen kept it together remarkably well, from the outside anyway.

“Better than you realize, I expect,” he replied absently, craning his head over his shoulder as he backed us out of the parking spot. He looked down, shifted into drive. “She’s dead inside. No spark of... passion, or soul, or whatever you want to call it. That’s the part in humans that responds to my kind. It’s what we feed on.”

“Ah. So my problem with the White Court is that I have too much soul?”

“No, Harry, your problem is that you think with your dick.”

“Oh, shut up and drive.”

“Yes, _sir_ ,” Thomas said, and gunned it.

 

The address from Helen took us to a Douglas neighborhood within shouting distance of the water, large houses that were nevertheless old enough and close enough to less savory parts of town that they had gone considerably downmarket since they were built. When the GPS informed us that we were at the location, we found ourselves in front of a three-story house enclosed by a relatively high wall, all made entirely of the same monotonous red brick, faced with a wrought-iron gate and a callbox.

I looked at Thomas. “Candygram?”

His mouth twitched. “Landshark. Or I could just open it.”

“Show-off.”

It was the work of seconds for Thomas to wrench the gate hard enough to break the mechanism and shove it open, and then he was back in the car and we were driving the rest of the distance to the house.

“Do you think someone noticed that?” I wondered aloud as we came to a halt. “And what do you want to bet they’re the type to shoot first and ask questions later?”

Thomas had gone on full alert, studying the house beneath drawn brows. At that, he shook his head minutely. “I don’t hear anything.”

“That’s good, isn’t it?”

“I don’t hear _anything_ ,” he repeated, his emphasis slightly more ominous this time.

I bit back a sigh and climbed out of the car, making sure I had my staff and blasting rod at the ready and then lifting my eyes to scan the windows of the higher floors. They were small and sparse, like a turn-of-the-century boarding house, but curtains had been tightly drawn over all of them and I didn’t see any snipers or curious residents peeking out to see what the racket had been.

“Harry,” Thomas called carefully over the roof of the car, “I don’t think we need to bother with stealth anymore.”

That sounded like the sort of understatement intended to convey that a dozen guys with guns were waiting for us, so it was with understandable trepidation that I edged around the car, blasting rod at the ready.

What I saw was nothing, at least until Thomas lifted a hand to point at the front door—or rather, what was left of it. “I don’t think that’s how it’s supposed to look.”

I hadn’t noticed it at first, set back under a covered awning as it was, but Thomas was right. Arguably it was still closed, since the hinges were in place and the deadbolt was still secured, but a great, splintered hole had been gouged out of the middle. The hole was large enough that a grown man could have climbed through it and moreover, in all defiance of the physics that said the hinges ought to have given way before solid wood did.

“Well,” I muttered under my breath, hoisting my staff for a better grip. “Looks like we’re not the first gate crashers to find this party. Thomas, you lead.”

He nodded without a word, all joking put aside, and slipped up to the house with speed and stealth that would put a Navy SEAL to shame. He paused on the porch, cocked his head to listen, and then beckoned me forward. As I approached, I was braced for the residue of whatever magic had been at work here, but I made it all the way up to the door and still felt nothing. The gaping, unnatural hole remained very much present though.

“I don’t feel any magic,” I whispered to Thomas.

He glanced above him, nostrils flaring. “I smell sulfur.”

“Crap,” I said succinctly.


	11. Chapter 11

Thomas went in first, threading himself through the hole in the door, and rather than waiting around for me to make a graceless spectacle of myself trying to follow, unlocked it from the inside to let me in.

We found the first body in the living room, face-down with his arms outstretched in front of him, as if the man had been scrabbling to keep himself from being dragged off, and only given up when the lower half of his body had been mostly severed from the top half. The blood had only just begun to dry, still much too fresh for any rot to have set in, just the raw, cloying smell of blood permeating the room. There was no point checking for a pulse, and it was clear even without looking at the face that it wasn’t Marcone, so I turned my eyes from the sight and we grimly continued our search of the house.

There were two men dead in the dining room, pizza and newspapers strewn across the table in a casual, homey way that contrasted sharply with the splintered chairs and disemboweled bodies slumped beside it. I had to keep myself from touching anything, because the last thing I wanted was my prints in a house that would soon have the police crawling all over it.

By now I could smell the sulfur too, a pervasive, dissonant odor that irritated the back of my throat and set my nerves on edge. They say that smell is the sense with the strongest emotional association, and this one had long ago set up residence in my brain as _Danger, Will Robinson!_

Thomas moved into the adjacent kitchen, which was connected to the backyard with a sliding glass door. The glass was shattered now, the door’s frame had been bent into a sharp angle at about knee height as if something had kicked it or slammed into it low. Through it I could see another body lying outside on the bright, sunny pavement, in better condition than the others but equally motionless. Thomas stood at the door, peering out into the sunshine and being careful not to touch anything.

“There’s another one further out in the yard,” he observed. “Those two seem to have gotten some degree of forewarning because they’re both holding guns. For all the good it did them.”

I glanced back toward the front door out of instinct. “We’d better hurry then. If shots were fired, someone’s bounds to have called the police.”

He nodded curtly. “Indeed.”

We finished sweeping the rest of the first floor, turning up a few more bodies in varying degrees of _very thoroughly dead_ , but still no sign of Marcone. Nor did we have any better luck on the second floor; it was full of low-budget, Walmart-furnished offices, a handful of bedrooms, and more of Torelli’s former associates, most of them torn to pieces as they’d been trying to flee. I wished I could remember what Torelli looked like well enough to tell whether he was among the dead, but I’d only met him once, and it had been years ago. Either way, he’d have a hell of a time rebuilding his power base after this.

By the time we reached the third floor, we were both starting to get antsy about how much longer we’d have to search. After a cursory check in all of the rooms, Thomas finally said, “Harry, we have to go. The cops are going to be here any minute, and I don’t need to tell you how much it would suck to get caught here.”

“I know, but we’ve got to find Marcone,” I insisted. “This, with the hellfire and the mutilations—this was demons, and we know for a fact that Attenborough’s been playing with demons lately. He doesn’t give a damn about Chicago mob politics—if he was here it’s because he was after Marcone, and I need to know what they did with him.”

“But what do you expect to find in this place?”

“A...” I stopped abruptly, and bowed my head while I forced myself to swallow down the sick taste in my throat. “A _body_ ,” I gritted out. “If it comes to that. Or someone who can at least tell us what the hell happened here. There’s still a chance that someone survived.”

Thomas rolled his eyes impatiently. “Yes, I know, narrative convention requires it, but—” He froze on the word, his gaze gone distant, and then he murmured, “Speak of the devil.”

“Thomas?”

“DON’T MOVE!” someone shouted from behind me, a voice that I didn’t have to turn around to know was packing heat and none too steady with it. “NEITHER OF YOU! I WANT YOUR HANDS WHERE I CAN FUCKIN’ SEE ’EM!”

“Well, silver lining, at least it’s not the police,” I muttered to Thomas in an undertone. Then over my shoulder I called, “Alright! We’re putting our hands up! No need to do anything hasty!”

Thomas had followed my lead, raising his hands above his shoulders and shooting me a look like this was somehow my fault. I slowly rotated until I was standing next to him and I could see the person holding us at gunpoint.

It was a burly young man, with low, thick brows that made him resemble a Hendricks-in-training and extensively tattooed forearms that shook as they held up a gun that wavered between me and Thomas. He was sweating profusely, his eyes wide beneath consternated eyebrows, and starkly terrified, his self-control dangling on such a fine thread that he was pretty much the last person I wanted pointing a gun at me right now.

“Who the fuck are you?” he demanded, punctuating the question with a shake of the gun that made me flinch.

I had the hysterically inappropriate thought that “Landshark” was probably the wrong answer.

“Look, man,” Thomas said, his voice low and soothing and subconsciously mimicking the kid’s cadences. “We didn’t do this. We just heard the shots and came in to—” 

“Don’t you fucking _lie to me!_ ” he shouted, the gun jerking and weaving perilously. “I heard you talking! You know who did this! You know... _what_...”

His eyes shuddered closed at the memory and in a heartbeat Thomas was at his side, deftly relieving him of the gun—and not a moment too soon, for he immediately panicked when he realized that someone had managed to sneak up on him, screaming and flailing until Thomas got him in a lock and forced him down to his knees. By then he was bawling, wailing that he would do whatever we wanted, just please don’t kill him, jesus help, he was too young to die. 

Thomas and I exchanged a glance.

Now I’m no professional, but I’ve done a fair bit of menacing in my day, and I was pretty sure this was out of order. Wasn’t it supposed to go, _first_ you menace, _then_ they crack and tell you whatever you want to know? At my expression, Thomas shrugged.

“Hey, snap out of it,” I ordered curtly, bending down to wave a hand in front of the thug’s face. “Where’s Marcone?”

“Gone, man,” the kid moaned. “He was upstairs but I seen it, he ain’t there no more.”

“What do you mean, gone?” I demanded. “Dead? Or just missing?”

“They took him away!” he wailed.

“Hey, Harry, I vote that we continue this interrogation in the car,” Thomas interrupted, shifting awkwardly to keep his grip on the young man’s arms.

I briefly assessed our options. “Yeah, let’s do that.”

We made an unwieldy procession downstairs. The goon only barely believed us when we said we weren’t going to hurt him and was obviously in shock, and also prone to freaking out when he saw the bloody corpses of men who must have been friends.

Thomas was all nerves by the time we were piling back into the car and buckling ourselves in, me in the backseat with our friendly and cooperative witness.

“And none too soon,” he muttered, adjusting his mirror to check on us and then throwing the Hummer into reverse. “Can you hear the sirens?”

I listened, though I didn’t Listen. “No.”

“You will soon. We’re getting out of here right under the wire.”

Thomas didn’t relax until we were well out of the neighborhood and easing back into the safety and anonymity of downtown traffic. Satisfied that we’d gotten away clean, I turned my attention to the goon next to me.

“Alright punk, you ready to answer some questions?” I asked, not even having to fake the hard edge in my voice. Thomas could play the good cop if he wanted—I sure as hell wasn’t in the mood for it today.

The young man was still pale and twitchy, but I had his attention.

“You worked for Torelli?” I asked.

He nodded.

“What’s your name?”

“Gian. Sir.” Apparently being brought up in the mob bred good manners toward perceived authority figures.

“Well, Gian, good news/bad news—good news, I’m not with the folks who murdered your buddies. Bad news, I’m with Marcone. So why did your boss find it necessary to haul him off at gunpoint this morning?”

Apparently finding out that I worked with Marcone— _with_ , damn it, not _for_ —was rather alarming in itself, because I’d managed to rouse him from his fear of whatever had attacked the house and make him afraid of me too.

“Uhh...” he stammered.

“Kid, I don’t have all day— _what did your boss want from Marcone?_ ”

“He wanted him to sign something!” Gian blurted out.

I blinked. “What, like a permission slip? What are you talking about?”

Either I wasn’t funny or Gian was too far gone to appreciate my sense of humor, because he didn’t even seem to register it. He shook his head vigorously. “No, ’cause Marcone’s the big boss, yeah? But the dude acts like he think he gonna live forever, he don’t got no next-in-line. Except maybe Torelli, who’s got his own boys working for him but Marcone’s been trying to cut him out of the loop lately.”

“Ever since Torelli tried to stage a coup while Marcone was taking a three-day weekend?” I asked skeptically. “Imagine that.”

Marcone, upon his return from being kidnapped by the Denarians, had breezily informed his subordinates that he’d been on a “three-day weekend”—this right after he’d been released from the hospital for exposure and internal injuries, and right before he scheduled himself an appointment with a cosmetic surgeon to see what could be done about his bitten-off ear. It was so transparently, self-evidently a lie that obviously if he’d wanted to be believed he would have told a different one—which meant that the _rumors_ about what he’d been up to proceeded to grow exponentially until they almost reached the truth. Meanwhile, I had started using the phrase “take a three-day weekend” as a euphemism to mean “go do unbelievably dangerous shit that should, by all rights, have gotten me killed.”

It was during that particular _three-day weekend_ that I’d had the dubious pleasure of meeting Torelli; I’d run into him in Helen’s office, where he was waving a gun around and threatening to rough up her girls if she didn’t cooperate. Thomas and I took care of it, but the encounter hadn’t left me with a high opinion of the man.

I sighed. “Your boss is an idiot, FYI. But carry on.”

Gian eyed me warily, as if I might bite him, but did after a moment. “Yeah, well, this time we figured he was gone for good. I mean, no way, not even a guy like him’s gonna talk his way out of murdering some dude and then getting caught standing right next to the fucking body, y’know?” He nodded and looked to me for agreement, clearly unaware that “some dude” happened to be sitting right next to him.

“Mmkay,” I said noncommittally. “So Torelli thinks Marcone is out of the picture, and then...?”

“Well he oughta been next—Torelli, I mean. He been around in the Outfit longer than even Marcone. But there’s guys that don’t see it like that, you know, since he and Marcone was always pissing up a tree about something or other, and they’re saying that Marcone’s successor oughta be the one Marcone picked, except everyone knows he never picked no one. And Torelli’s been busting his ass trying to make the rest of them stupid fuckers see sense, that _he’s_ the one in the best spot to take over for Marcone.”

At three syllables, ‘successor’ sounded out of place in the kid’s mouth, but I only nodded to show that I was paying attention. This was sounding a lot like the picture that Murphy had painted for me about the deteriorating gang situation. “I see,” I said.

“Yeah, so then a couple days ago, some guys start turning up at the hotspots, asking around about Marcone, if anyone’s seen him or whatever—and they were talking like he wasn’t in jail no more, like they knew something that we didn’t. I never met none of them, but I heard they were offering a fuckton of money if someone could give them Marcone.”

Ah-huh. Because there’s no way _that_ could end badly.

“And so Torelli’s thinking, What if Marcone really is still around, right? Then if Torelli can get his hands on Marcone before anyone else knows the dude’s back, he can get Marcone to sign over all his money and shit to him. Then for a bonus, he hands him over to the guys who’s offering him tons of money for Marcone and promising that he won’t be showing up again to cause us no more trouble.”

“And so when Helen called him to say that Marcone was coming back to the office for a bit, he tried to do exactly that,” I guessed flatly, letting my forehead settle against my palm. “Oh, for the love of Merlin.”

Because you know, I never like to believe the worst of people, but honestly—how _stupid_ can you get? Maybe hanging out with the mob for too long dulled your edge when it came to these things, but was it really so hard to notice when something sounded spectacularly fishy? What, Marcone? We can take him off your hands! Forever! And we’ll totally leave you alive to tell everyone that we took him off your hands forever!

“Okay,” I began slowly. “You know what happens in the movies when dorky, inept bad guys try to make a deal with _really badass_ bad guys? _This_ is what happens.”

“Why would they do this, man? We was giving ’em Marcone!”

 _Because they’re evil, and you’re stupid_ , I thought uncharitably, but some small measure of sympathy kept me from saying so out loud. “I don’t care,” I said instead. “Just tell me whether or not Marcone is still alive.”

“I dunno, man. But I saw he was still alive when they took him away.”

“You know that for certain?” I asked sharply. “You actually saw it?”

He shivered. “I was up in the attic looking for a fucking football when suddenly the screaming started. I’da been down there to do my part, but I heard this... this _noise_... it’s like it was all inside my head, bees inside my goddamn brain, and I couldn’t think or nothing, and it was all I could do just to stay up there with my gun and not fucking shit myself. ’Till suddenly it stopped and I could think again. So I took my gun and went downstairs to see what’d gone on, and I heard ’em talking.”

He seemed rather fixated on the gun—probably the only thing that had made him feel like he had any measure of control over the situation.

“I heard Marcone, he was talking all fucking fancy the way he do, all like, ‘Just when I thought my day couldn’t get any worse,’ and I didn’t hear what the other dude said, ’cuz I poked my head around the corner and this, this...” He choked and his throat worked noiselessly several times before he got out, “this _thing_ was there. It was...!”

“A demon,” I said flatly. “You saw a demon.”

The eyes he turned on me were stark and horrified, and made him look much younger. “Is that what’s waiting for me?” he asked, barely above a whisper. “If I go to hell, I mean. Is that what I’m going to find there?”

I gave an agnostic shrug. “I don’t know, I’ve never been to hell. Could be.”

Gian turned away, shuddering. “Oh, sweet God, gimme another chance. I’ll be good, I swear.”

“And Marcone?”

“ _It saw me!_ ” he wailed. “It looked straight fucking at me and it fucking _smiled_ and it didn’t do nothing. Why didn’t it do nothing?!”

“Attenborough probably bound it against its will,” Thomas suggested from the front seat. I’d all but forgotten he was there, since he was being as silent as a chauffeur. I glanced up and met his eyes in the rearview mirror. “Which means that it has to obey him—and it will, to the letter—but left to its own devices, it won’t lift a finger to help him. I imagine it didn’t have specific orders at that point, so it let our friend here get away with nothing more than a scare as a little ‘fuck you’ to Attenborough.”

“Well, enemy of my enemy is... a bonus, I guess,” I said dubiously. “Though not really something you want to bank on. So then this guy took Marcone away?”

“Hell if I know!” Gian declared. He looked at me like I must be crazy, or stupid. “When I saw that thing looking at me I ran the fuck away, and by the time I came back they’d all gone.”

I blew out the shaky breath I’d been holding in and let myself slump back against the seat. Well, _gone_ was better than _conclusively dead_ at least, but I didn’t know by how much, and I didn’t know for how long. I closed my eyes, trying to shake the persistent image of Marcone torn to shreds like the other poor bastards in Torelli’s house.

And of all fool things. We’d been _so careful_. With the safehouse, with the disguises—only for him to get nabbed off the street in broad daylight, courtesy of his backstabbing secretary. And I couldn’t even get righteously angry with her the way I wanted to, knowing that I was also to blame for our current predicament. That if he died, it really would be my fault. Me and my need-to-know bullshit.

“Hey, Harry?” Thomas called over his shoulder. “If you’re done interrogating the guy, what do you want us to do with him?”

I looked across to the goon, who was hunched over his seat looking forlorn and abjectly miserable, a demeanor that sat oddly on his burly, tattooed frame. There was none of the bluster or posturing that had usually been my great joy to experience when dealing with thugs his age, only wary, watchful silence. He had seen too much, and too recently, to have the courage born of ignorance.

I sighed. “Let’s just take the kid home.”

 

Gian gave us directions to his mother’s place, a shabby apartment complex in Englewood, and we let him off in the parking lot. He didn’t thank us for deciding not to kill him, didn’t say much of anything at all, which I chalked up to incipient shock. I got out when he did and moved up to the front seat.

“You be good,” I warned as I climbed back into the car. I’d meant it mostly ironically, but the nod he gave me in return was deathly earnest.

“I will,” he promised somberly. “I’m going straight, man. I don’t want to see nothing like that ever again. Because when I kick it... that ain’t where I want to go.”

I couldn’t think of a proper response to that, since he was stone-cold serious and I’m pathologically cynical, so I just nodded and said nothing as Thomas took us out of the parking lot again.

“You know, Michael would see God’s hand at work in that,” I remarked after a minute or so.

Thomas shrugged. “Stranger things have happened. Though frankly, the idea of a god who’d let three dozen guys get iced just to teach one dumb teenager a lesson isn’t one that sits well with me. Reminds me too much of my sister.”

“Amen to that,” I agreed wearily, closing my eyes and sinking back into the chair.

My brain was still working like a hamster on a wheel, cycling through ultimately futile ideas about how I was supposed to rescue Marcone. I wanted to rescue him, but I didn’t know where he was. I knew that Attenborough had him, but I didn’t know where Attenborough was. Jonathan knew, but he couldn’t tell me, and the plan was to wait for him to rendezvous with his boss and then follow him, which I couldn’t do yet because he was still at work. Which meant that the only thing I could do now was wait, but then I started worrying about what they might be doing to Marcone in the interim and I wanted to get him out of there _now_ , only I didn’t know where he was, see step 1. Hell’s bells, my head hurt.

Or I could go with the idea that had occurred to me earlier—get back to the safehouse and scrounge around for a couple of Marcone’s hairs, which shouldn’t be hard to find and would then take me right to him—which might or might not be of any use, seeing as my backup wasn’t here yet. 

I asked Thomas if he’d be willing to drive to Michigan.

“Well, I don’t mind the drive,” he said. “But don’t you need me to keep an eye on that thing at the house for you? Or has the game changed now that Marcone’s been kidnapped?”

“Oh—damn it, I’d forgotten. No, it hasn’t, I still need you to tell me when Jonathan starts moving.” I drummed my fingers on the armrest. “I don’t suppose you’d be willing to let me borrow your car, then?”

Thomas spared a glance from the road to give me a skeptical look. “Trust you and your evil, technology-destroying powers with my baby?”

“Uhm... pretty please?”

“Alright, but only on one condition.”

“I promise I won’t have sex in your backseat.”

“Pfft,” he said dismissively. “You can fuck all you like in my backseat—honestly, what do you think I am? And what do you think I keep buying Hummers for? No, my condition is that if you’re going to take my car, you have to stop by a drive-through and get yourself something to eat.”

I blinked. “What?”

“You heard me, Harry. I _know_ how you can get—you’re going to brood and fixate on this and completely forget to take care of yourself. Which is all very dramatically Byronic, right up to the point where you pass out during your heroic rescue because you haven’t eaten or slept for three days. So, what’s it going to be? Are you, or are you not, stopping by McDonald’s on your way home?”

“Burger King,” I corrected grudgingly. “But I’m not hungry.”

“See how much I care,” he shot back, utterly without sympathy. “You’ll buy it, and then you’ll make yourself eat it. Seriously, Harry, you’re running on fumes right now, and if you won’t look out for yourself then I will. Deal?”

“Deal.”

Thomas made me seal the pact with this weirdly complicated handshake ritual he’d made up himself, proof if nothing else was that he should have been born a frat boy, and had me repeat it until I got it right.

“You know how stupid that is, right?” I grumbled.

“You say that, but it’ll come in extremely handy on the day that one or the other of us is being impersonated by shapeshifting evil,” he said, unperturbed. 

“Uh-huh, because they’ll never guess your secret code _._ ”

“No, because _they’ll_ figure it out in under five tries.”

I ended up dropping Thomas off at the grocery store near my house, because he wanted more junk food and said he would walk home from there. I switched to the driver’s side, pushed the seat back about six inches, and continued onward.

The clock on the dashboard read 1:37, and as much as I wanted to beat a hasty retreat back to the safehouse, Chicago traffic had turned out in force for the lunch rush. I found myself reduced to a crawl for the trip across town and it took a good half hour before I was on the freeway heading to Michigan. The only thing that kept me from speeding like my tail was on fire was the consequences of getting pulled over, when I was supposed to be dead and was driving a car that might well have been sighted near the scene of a massacre this morning.

As per Thomas’s orders, I did pull off the freeway long enough to drive through a Burger King. I still didn’t feel like eating, my mouth was dry and nothing sounded appetizing, but my stomach was empty and cramping (about as he’d predicted) so I bought a burger and made myself munch on fries as I finished driving to the house. I didn’t really know what I planned to do even if I managed to establish where Marcone was, since it was still several hours before any of my backup arrived, but I couldn’t stand around doing nothing.

I was twenty minutes from the safehouse when I realized something that nearly made me plow Thomas’s Hummer into a ditch—namely, that if Attenborough had Marcone, then he also had access to everything that Marcone knew, one way or another. It wasn’t that Marcone was a pushover, just that Attenborough had at his disposal all the bad-voodoo magic I could do and then some, without my scruples about using it. Whatever information he wanted from Marcone, he would get, and I just hoped that Marcone had enough sense to realize that.

But damn it, who was I kidding. Marcone was a stubborn sonovabitch, and he wasn’t going to make it any easier for Attenborough than he had to, _especially_ since it would mean selling me out. I swore and pounded on the wheel a few times, helpless to do anything but hope that Attenborough wouldn’t break him too badly to be put back together.

But either way, the fact remained that our safehouse was suddenly somewhat of a misnomer—or if it wasn’t yet, then it very soon would be. And Bob and Molly were in a lot of danger.

I gunned it the rest of the way back and burst in the front door with more speed than stealth.

“Molly? Bob!” I shouted. There was no answer and I started up the stairs. “Molly—!” I started again when I turned the corner and ran straight into her.

“Whoa, you startled me!” she exclaimed, somewhat unnecessarily. “Sorry, I heard you calling but I was in the bathroom.”

She was indeed wiping damp hands on the front of her jeans and I could hear the toilet still flushing. No emergency, or none until I had charged in, afraid that I would find myself arriving yet again too late.

“Okay,” I said. _Breathe, Harry._ I ran my hands through my hair, my pulse still hammering. “We have a problem.”

“Yeah, I thought we might,” she agreed a little dryly, taking in my state of agitation. “What happened?”

“Marcone’s been taken, the safehouse has been compromised—we’ve got to grab our shit and get out of here. Get your stuff, collect the potions we made the other evening, and meet me downstairs.”

Her eyes widened and I could see her blinking as she digested that news and its implications. “Okay,” she said, holding her questions for the moment. “What are you going to do?”

“Find Marcone,” I said grimly.

I left her to go take care of that and hurried on to the master bedroom, where the bed was still unmade from when we’d gotten up that morning. I was looking for hair that I could use to track him; they weren’t hard to spot on the cream-colored sheets, but I’d slept there too and some of them were bound to be mine. I kept looking until I found a strand of gray that vanity insisted couldn’t belong to me, and keeping it pinched tightly between my fingers, I hurried back downstairs.

In the kitchen, the light on the answering machine was blinking persistently to get my attention, so I pushed the button to let it run and then got busy at the dining room table, shoving the newspapers aside to clear a space to work and producing a stub of chalk from my coat.

An automated voice announced the timestamp, noonish, and Molly’s voice came over the machine.

“Hey guys, it’s me, Molly,” she said. “Done all I need to do here, and She Who Must Be Obeyed says I’m free to go.” She paused, as if hoping that someone would pick up. “Anyway, uhm... I’m on my way back, see you in a bit.”

I sketched out the circle and runes needed for the seeking spell and carefully placed the strand of hair in the middle. The machine, a chatty one apparently, informed me that I could press 1 to replay, and then moved onto the next message, this one less than an hour old.

“Hey, Harry, this is Thomas. I was watching the diorama like you wanted me to, and about twenty minutes after you left it started moving. It rolled over the pier and straight into the water, then kept going until it fell off the map. I tried putting it back on the board, but it just did the same thing again. I hope that helps. I dunno, call me back if you need me to do something else.”

The machine announced the end of messages, beeped again just for good measure, and then fell silent. My fingers were resting on the edge of the circle and the word to trigger the spell was on the tip of my tongue, but I didn’t move.

Jonathan had gone out into the lake. And as far as I knew, there was only one thing out there that would be of interest to a wizard like Attenborough.

“Please let me be wrong,” I murmured. “ _Quaero_.”

I felt the hook in my chest as the spell took effect, drawing my gaze unerringly to the dining room’s big picture window that overlooked Lake Michigan. I didn’t have to take my bearings to know what was waiting for me beyond the curve of the horizon—I could _feel_ it, with the same uncanny foreboding as last time. 

The island.

Only it was far more than that. It was the confluence of every ley line for a hundred miles around, a deceptively tranquil shell of earth perched above a maelstrom of volatile, near-limitless power, and haunted by a malevolent intelligence that scared the wizards whose power scared _me_.

But that was where Attenborough had Marcone, and I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that I would be headed there too—whether I liked it or not.

 

I killed the spell, since it wasn’t telling me anything I didn’t already know (I _knew_ where Marcone was, for all the good it did me) and because it was going to get really, old really fast to have it actively agitating for me to follow it. Now it was only my conscience gnawing at me to run to Marcone’s rescue, no spells required.

Then I forced myself to stop, take a deep breath, and review the situation.

Fact: Marcone was alive. The tracking spell had taken, which meant that he wasn’t dead, not yet anyway. There was still the chance to save him.

Fact: Attenborough had him—and this was the guy that Jonathan would rather see his own wife dead than let her fall into his hands. Marcone might well be wishing that he _weren’t_ still alive, and I was better off not thinking about that possibility.

Fact: We knew where to find the asshole. Though I doubted it would be as simple as walking up to his doorstep and punching him in the face, at least we had a location and could plan some our strategy accordingly.

So what would Marcone do, it occurred to me to wonder, if our positions were reversed? The answer came fairly easily. He would gather as much intelligence as he could, assemble as much firepower as he could, then him them hard and hit them fast. And the intelligence might have been sadly lacking, but the firepower...

 _An arsenal in the basement._

Veda had mentioned it before she left, though I hadn’t been down there to check for myself yet. In fact I’d forgotten about it altogether, probably hoping we wouldn’t need it, but if ever there was a time for heavy firepower, this was it.

It took me a few minutes to even find the basement—cellars are unsightly or so the theory goes, which meant that the door had been tucked away somewhere discreet. I found it in the garage and was delayed some more looking for the light switch, which turned on a series of bare, blindingly white bulbs that led down an unfinished cinderblock stair. 

I suppose I’d been expecting something like a walk-in gun closet or the display case of a high-end gun store, but the reality was more prosaic than that. There hadn’t been any point in putting everything on display, of course, so Veda had simply dumped a few crates in the middle of the clean-swept floor and left a crowbar on top so we could open them. Evidently she wasn’t one to leave us in the proverbial bomb shelter with no can opener.

The first case was filled with haphazardly stacked automatics and semi-automatics—good enough for Marcone, I supposed, but high-tech enough that I wouldn’t trust any of them not to jam in my hands. I abandoned them and moved on to the next case. 

Now if anyone else had been packing this, it would probably never have occurred to them that the person who was going to need this equipment might be a wizard, and I would have opened the other two crates to find them also full of automatics. Veda, however, was a wizard, so the possibility had occurred to her, and I opened the next crate to an array of .44 magnum handguns.

“Just what the doctor ordered,” I said under my breath, picking out a Smith and Wesson revolver and feeling the weight of it in my palm. 

I stripped off my coat so that I could fasten the shoulder harness around my chest, adjusting the straps and checking the barrels for ammunition before strapping on the S&W and a Remington of the same caliber. I did plan to take a couple of the machine guns too, figuring it couldn’t hurt to be able to carpet an area with bullets for as long as the gun would last, but it couldn’t be relied on; these babies could.

The last crate turned out not to be guns, but miscellaneous equipment. I couldn’t even identify a quarter of the stuff in there, but among the things I did recognize were grappling hooks, gas masks, flak vests, grenades, and something that looked like smoke bombs. I grabbed a duffel and started throwing stuff in. With the way Veda had been packing, I wouldn’t have been surprised to find a kitchen sink in there. 

“Harry?” I heard Molly call from the top of the stairs.

“Down here,” I called back. 

I heard her awkward gait coming down the stairs, weighted down by the duffel she was lugging with her. “Hey, I got the stuff you asked for, you—wow, that’s a lot of guns—you ready to go?”

“Yeah, I think I got everything I need.” 

“Want help carrying anything?”

“No, I think I’ve got it.”

“Good, ’cause I’ve got my hands full already and you’d be shit out of luck.”

“Twerp,” I grunted, hoisting my own duffel over my shoulder. “You’re going to—”

I never got to finish that thought, because the wards chose that moment to go _whump-whump-whump-whump-whump_ in rapid succession as five—count ’em, _five_ —preternatural somethings crossed the outer perimeter.

“Harry...” Molly began urgently.

“I heard it too, kid—I think it’s time we got the hell out of Dodge.” I tugged my bag higher on my shoulder, then ran up the stairs with Molly close on my heels.

“You and your cowboy metaphors,” she huffed, breathing hard as she sprinted to match my longer-legged stride.

“Yeah, well, drop on a veil on us, amiga.”

“ _Cupio omnia quae vis_ ,” she retorted, and a half-heartbeat later I felt the cool, slightly tingly weight of a veil.

“And rub it in that your Latin’s gotten better than mine,” I grumbled as we emerged into the sunny kitchen again. 

It was still deceptively tranquil, with bright, colorless light spilling in through the gauze curtains and the house uncannily silent except for the sound of wind whining over the eaves. A better setting for curling up with a good book than for facing down monsters, which made it hard to muster the proper level of urgency. Instead, I mostly just felt foolish as I bolted across the serene living room for the back door.

“You’ve got Bob?” I checked, glancing back at Molly as I threw open the deadbolt.

She had been looking over her shoulder at the front door, but now her head jerked back around, her face blank with surprise. “No?” she said, with a note of incipient panic that made it sound like a question. “I thought you did? I didn’t see him when I went in your room.”

“He should have been there, he’s—oh crap,” I realized, my heart sinking. “He’s still in the closet.”

Anything, _anything_ but Bob we could have left behind.

“Molly—get out the back way, stay invisible, circle round to the front. I’m going to try to grab Bob and sneak out without being seen—but if it turns into a fight, I want you to run,you hear me? Don’t try to get involved.”

I didn’t have time to wait and see if she obeyed. I sprinted back across the living room and then up the staircase, taking the steps two at a time. Through the quiet house, I could hear the sound of a car with an uncommonly loud engine coming down the street, puttering closer and then rumbling to a halt out front. I crossed the upstairs hall in four rapid strides and burst into my bedroom, throwing open the closet doors and finding Bob perched in the middle of the empty shelves, right where we’d left him.

At the noise, his eyes flickered on, flaring as he woke then subsiding.

“Hey boss, what’s the emergency—”

I didn’t give him a chance to finish, unzipping the duffel bag and thrusting his skull inside. “No time to explain, just stay in there and stay quiet.”

I heard a car door slam outside. I checked to make sure the veil was still in place and then hurried back down the hallway, trying not to sound like a herd of stampeding elephants this time. From the top of the stairs I could see through down into the foyer and through the windows, where a handful of people were coming up the walk. People in gray cloaks. Wardens.

_...A file, with evidence that would bring the Wardens down on your ass fast enough to leave nothing but a wizard-shaped smear on the sidewalk..._

Christ, but Attenborough hadn’t wasted any time, had he? I hurried down the stairs, feeling uncomfortably exposed even though I knew Molly’s veils were top-notch. I couldn’t keep from flinching away from the door though, my nerves on a hair-fine trigger with the knowledge that the wards were likely to blow as soon as someone tried to tamper with them—and since I hadn’t been the one to make them, I had no idea how hard or in which direction the shrapnel was likely to be flying from.

I was expecting an explosion and I’d braced myself for one. What I hadn’t expected was for the doorbell to ring.

I’d made it to the back door when the bell chimed, and for sheer originality it made me stop. Because seriously, how often do bad guys ring the doorbell and politely wait for you to let them into your secret headquarters? Had I missed something? Were they trying to use reverse psychology on me? I actually found myself considering it for a split second, just out of deeply-ingrained instinct (when someone rings the doorbell, you answer it, that’s how it works) before remembering that, oh yeah, that would be _Looney Tunes levels of stupid._

I was all ready to ignore it—if they wanted to give me a head start, I’d be happy to take it—and my hand was on the doorknob when I heard a woman calling my name.

“Harry?” Someone knocked on the door. “Harry?”

My first thought was, _Molly?_ followed by a moment’s irrational panic that they had seen through her veils and caught her somehow. Then I realized that although the voice was familiar and female, it wasn’t Molly. 

It was Luccio.

 

 

 


	12. Chapter 12

Luccio knocked again. “Harry? It’s me, Ana. Are you there?”

I drew in a breath, my mind racing. Luccio was a warden, yes, but I trusted her more than the others. No, scratch that—I _trusted her_ , full stop. The romance between us hadn’t made it very far, but we’d gotten pretty close and we’d stayed friends. I knew Luccio, and moreover, she knew me—she knew that I wouldn’t work for the Black Council. Of all the wardens, she was the one most likely to believe me if I told her what Attenborough was up to. 

She knocked again, persistent but not forceful, not the authoritative rap of a police knock. “Harry, if you’re there, I need to talk to you.” She couldn’t disguise the thread of worry in her voice. I could see her figure silhouetted dark against the rippled glass, shifting as if she were trying to see in. “There’s something very odd going on. If you’re there, please open the door.”

Luccio would believe me. And frankly, there was no point trying to keep this on the down-low anymore—Attenborough knew we were gunning for him, and so I might as well bring in all the allies I could find. I made my decision.

Putting the bag down by the back door and shaking off the veil, I turned to retrace my steps across the living room. “Ana?”

Through the glass I saw her head came up. “Harry?”

“Yeah, it’s me.” I was just on the other side of the door now. “Don’t try to force the door, it’s warded. I need to talk to you, but I want you to tell your guys to back off.”

I saw her turn to look over her shoulder, nodding as she exchanged words quietly with her subordinates. A moment later the other wardens disappeared back down the path. I threw the deadbolt back and parted the wards for Luccio.

She looked the same as before, barely old enough to buy liquor, though in fact she was several centuries older than me—there’d been a run-in with a body snatcher and Luccio had traded up a slightly-used wizard body for a newer and shinier model. I got the feeling that anyone else wearing that body might have trouble being taken seriously—it looked like it belonged to a sorority sister—but Luccio’s take-no-bullshit attitude had transferred over without a hiccup. I always found myself straightening around her, as you would before a drill sergeant.

The last time I’d seen her, we’d been drinking and laughing in a bar in Scotland after some interminably boring White Council session—now, laughter was clearly the furthest thing from her mind. Everything about her face and posture read strain, recent stresses already putting lines in her new face. Her hands weren’t quite resting on her weapons, but they were ready to be there in a hurry, and it wasn’t putting her at ease to see me with my staff and blasting rod still poised for combat.

“Okay, let’s call truce,” I said, meeting her eyes to show that I wasn’t making any fast moves as I tucked the blasting rod back into my coat.

She didn’t exactly relax, but she took her hand away from her sword and glanced briefly over her shoulder to make sure that none of her people were lingering on the other side of the door. “Harry, what’s going on?” she demanded in a low voice. “Why do you have yourself barricaded in like this? What in heaven’s name did you _do?_ ”

“I haven’t done anything. Look, whatever they told you to get you out here, it’s not true—I’m being set up.”

She frowned. “By whom?”

“Attenborough.”

“ _Attenborough?_ ” Luccio echoed, recoiling with surprise. She shook her head uneasily. “That’s impossible.”

“Why? Because he’s such a nice guy?” 

“Frankly... yes,” she told me. “Attenborough is extremely well-regarded on the Council.”

And wasn’t that just what I needed to hear.

I ground my teeth and scrubbed my hands over my hair. “Look, I don’t care if they think rainbows and unicorns fly out of his ass! He’s been summoning demons, using black magic, and breaking the Accords and the Laws every which way—the man’s a goddamned puppet master, and now he’s trying to get me out of the way because I know too much.”

She put up a hand to hold me off while she thought, her face set in a troubled frown. “Harry, I’m not saying that I don’t believe you... but those are some very heavy accusations. If you can’t produce evidence to back you up, then you’re going to have a hard time convincing anyone of this. It’s going to come down to his word against yours—and you knowhow that’s likely to turn out.” 

“I _have_ evidence! I just came from the aftermath of a massacre, where his demons slaughtered dozens upon dozens of plain-vanilla humans, _civilians_ , who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and I have two more people that he’s tried to muzzle with a silencing spell. Do I need to keep going, or is that proof enough to make the White Council pull their thumbs out of their asses, you think?”

She pursed her lips. “It’s not my place to say. But you need to come back with me. They need to hear this from you directly.”

“Ana? Don’t take this the wrong way, but _hell no_. Mine isn’t the only life on the line right now, and I do not have the time to deal with White Council paper-pushing. Attenborough took a friend of mine hostage, and I need to get him back before it’s too late.”

“And I understand that, but Attenborough isn’t my responsibility right now— _you are_.”

“Look, I swear to you, when this is over, I’ll come back and deal with everything, but _not now_. You have to trust me.”

“It’s not a question of trust, Harry. I’m under orders to bring you back, _alive or dead_. Do you understand what that means? I was told to use lethal force if necessary, that’s how serious they are about this. If I go back to the Council and tell them that I found you but let you go because you _promised_ you’d be back, you think they’re going to accept that? They’re just going to send someone else, someone who won’t bother talking to you first.”

“I’m not the bad guy here!”

“I know.” She laid a hand on my arm to still me, shutting her eyes briefly as if this pained her. “Please, just come with me quietly. You can tell the White Council what you’ve told me and I’ll make sure that they listen. This is your best option.”

“They’re not going to believe me and you know it,” I said with flat certainty. “They’re going to chop my head off the moment I step through the door, or throw me in a dungeon until they reach a consensus on what to chop my head off for.”

“Harry, I know.”

“No, _you don’t!_ You have no idea what Attenborough’s done, or what he’s planning to do, and you can’t afford to lock up the only guy doing damage control!”

“ _Harry_ ,” she repeated gently, giving my arm a comforting squeeze. “I know. Really.”

She looked me square in the face. Smiled reassuringly. And then drove the heel of her hand into my chest.

It knocked the air clean out of my lungs and I staggered backward, gasping like a fish out of water. Before I found my breath again, she landed a kick at the back of my knee and sent me to the floor.

“Ana!” I sputtered. “What—”

Luccio had my arm and was wrenching it around behind me, forcing me onto my stomach. Her weight came down on me solidly, her knee pressing into the small of my back while my face got acquainted with the carpet.

“Luccio!” I panted, spitting carpet lint. “Please, don’t do this!”

She pulled my arms back neatly and I felt currents shift as she started working magic. I could struggle, but she’d been a warrior for centuries longer than I’d even been alive—I wasn’t going anywhere. A moment later something slid around my wrists, a spell that felt cool and rubbery, pliant like putty until I tried to pull my hands free and it clamped down with a core like iron. Satisfied that I was going nowhere, Luccio released my arms and climbed off me.

“Luccio, _please_ ,” I begged. “Attenborough has a friend of mine held captive, and if I don’t save him in time, he’s going to die! You can’t turn me over to the Council now.”

She circled round to stand in front of me, her footsteps light on the carpet. “I’m not going to.”

I lifted my head to look at her. “Then why…”

Then all at once, I got it. 

She wasn’t a cat’s paw, working for a Council being manipulated by Attenborough’s machinations. She was working for him directly—and I had stupidly, _stupidly_ played straight into their hands.

She drew her sword from its sheath, the blade making a soft, musical zing as she did, and lowered it until the tip hovered steadily at my neck. 

“Ana,” I pleaded, tugging futilely at the spell binding my hands. “Why are you doing this? The things he’s done, the things he _plans_ to do—why are you helping him?”

“I don’t know,” she said, without hesitating for even a moment.

My blood went cold. Because this was worse than the realization that Luccio had gone dark side—that, at least, could have been explained. Nobody was incapable of being corrupted, nobody was beyond threats or blackmail. Anyone could betray, given the right incentive. There were so many answers she could have given, answers I would have understood, but _I don’t know_ wasn’t one of them. 

There was only one explanation for that kind of disconnect between her words and her actions: mind control. I looked at her in disbelief, hoping for some sign that I could be wrong. It shouldn’t have even been possible, not at her age, but the evidence was right in front of me and unmistakable. 

“Luccio, listen to me, please,” I said, watching her carefully. Not a flicker of emotion to show whether or not I was getting through to her. “We’re on the same side. We’ve saved each other’s lives before. I’m your friend, remember? For god’s sake, given a bottle of wine and the chance to drink it, we probably would have ended up in bed together. You don’t want to kill me.”

“No, I don’t want to,” she said dispassionately. “But I will. I didn’t want to sleep with you either, but I would have done that too.”

My skin prickled and went cold. “What are you saying?”

“That I obey.” She stepped forward and raised the sword over my head.

They’d had her all along, I realized, struck with sick, staggering nausea. God, for a year, at least, because that was how long we’d been doing our off-and-on flirting, batting back and forth an interest that I’d thought was reciprocated. How close we’d come to having sex and how much I had wanted to, and how she hadn’t wanted it at all.

Then something flashed through the air, startling both of us. It crashed against the far wall with a short, tinkling shatter of broken glass.

Luccio moved immediately, stepping in to placing me as a shield between herself and the source of the projectile. She grabbed me by the hair and yanked my head back, pulling me up as far as my knees would go and pressing her sword against my exposed neck. 

“Who’s there?” she demanded of the empty room.

I turned my neck as much as I dared, straining my eyes to get a glimpse of what had hit the wall. A Rorschach blot the color of dirty dishwater had splattered over the white plaster, and the floor around it was littered with shards of broken green glass. Lying among them was the round, splintered base of a bottle, shabby in the fading dusk.

“Show yourself!” she ordered. “Or I cut his throat.”

“You were going to do it anyway,” I forced out through gritted teeth, trying not to move my throat against that sharp edge. In the corner of my eye I thought I saw the stain moving, growing, coalescing into a shape.

She ignored me. “This is your last chance!” she barked into the darkness. “You have until the count of three to show yourself.”

Darkness. It hadn’t been this dark a moment ago. And it was getting darker still, the light dying by degrees, so rapidly that my eyes could almost see the change as it happened. For one lucid moment I thought it was a storm moving in to hide the sun, but this was something else entirely. This was an unnatural darkness, thickening, gathering in the corners of the house, creeping outward inch by inch like a nighttime predator loosed by the coming of shadow.

“One!”

“Luccio,” I whispered. I wasn’t any less afraid of her than I had been, but suddenly I was much more afraid of something else. “I think we need to get out of here.”

She gave my head a hard shake to silence me, and I felt a hot, sharp pain as the edge of her sword laid a shallow cut in my skin.

“Two!”

The stain on the wall had grown, like water spreading to fill a tray, forming a rectangle of gray against the gloomy white of the wall. Not gray—black. And it wasn’t a stain anymore, it was a door.

_The danger of doors is that things can come through them._

“Luccio…!” I said, low and desperate. The hair on my arms was standing on end and every instinct in my body was screaming at me to run. My eyes were wide, going dry as I scarcely dared to blink, fixed on the door in the failing light. 

“Three!”

She would have slit my throat, except that in the half second of silence that followed, there came the clear, unmistakable click of a doorknob turning.

“ _Che_ …” Luccio began angrily, turning to the noise, but the curse died on her lips.

I could hear the wind starting to rise again, a keening whistle where it tore across the eaves. No, not over the eaves—it was coming from inside the walls, growing louder, pressing against the door as if straining to escape.

“Luccio, we have to—”

“No!” she shouted, loud and frightened, but she wasn’t talking to me. She shook her head in furious denial, eyes wide as if she could hear something that I couldn’t. 

The door had begun slowly opening outward. It was releasing a sound that I couldn’t put words to, a toneless buzz that started higher than human hearing but growing louder and more menacing with every ticking second, into a cacophonous roar, until I was _afraid of it_ , not of what it portended, but afraid of the sound itself, afraid that it would fill my head and drive out all room for thought, that my mind would split in two. It was deafening, impossible to endure, and only growing louder, pouring out of the door, out of a darkness emptier and more absolute than anything I had seen. 

And either the door had grown, or suddenly we were much closer to it.

“No!” Luccio shouted again. She shoved me away from her, and I lurched forward, landing hard on my shoulder. Luccio slashed with her sword at the empty air, a feeble, desperate gesture.

Then my foot went over the edge and I screamed. I was in the doorway itself and the vaulted frame of it loomed over me as high as a cathedral ceiling, relentlessly dragging me into a nothingness that I would never find my way out of. 

_The danger of doors is that they can lock behind you._

I desperately scrambled to get away from it, struggling like a limbless thing since my hands were still bound behind me. I twisted across the floor, worming on knees and elbows, until a sudden, searing pain in my arm brought me back to myself. 

I jerked away from the pain and then looked down to see the wickedly sharp contour of a glass bottle, blood running along its jagged edge. It still retained a ghost of its former shape, a ring of glass teeth clinging to a handmade paper label. Not Heineken.

Right—Harry’s homebrew. Hallucinogenic Molotov cocktails. Just the thing to throw when you need some confusion in which to make your escape.

Only I was quickly coming to realize that this was the last house I wanted to get high in. It was _real_ , the anger and the evil clinging to the house; impossible that all this could be the product of my imagination. It was too vivid, too strong, too overwhelmingly, overpoweringly _loud_.  I couldn’t think, couldn’t concentrate, my thoughts drowned out in my own head by those incessant, suffocating howls.

_Oh, god…_

That wasn’t the sound of wind. It never had been. It was someone screaming—and screaming, _and screaming…_

I had been hearing that sound since we got there and hadn’t recognized it for what it was. They were in the walls, these furious shades, screaming their rage and their revenge, watching us with dead, jealous eyes as we talked, worked, ate, slept, made love…

We never should have come here. Marcone never should have had this house rebuilt. The corruption in it was more than a sour smell in the air, it was sunk into the very stones, toxic in its hatred, poisoned with the souls that had suffered here. It should have been burnt to its foundations and the ashes salted.

Luccio was long gone. The dark had swallowed her and left me alone with the door. 

My hands had somehow worked themselves loose of the binding spell—an unforeseen side effect of the potion or, more likely, dispersed when Luccio lost her concentration. Finding my hands suddenly free, I scrambled forward.

Or tried to anyway, but my fingers couldn’t get any purchase on the carpet. What I’d thought was wool and fiber was now crumbling, scraping up beneath my nails to reveal a surface pliant and gray, warmer than it should have been, supple with a distant, background throb.

_Alive._

This wasn’t a house at all. It was a gaping maw dressed in brick and mortar, a skin of plaster over a mouth that would swallow us whole.

The screams were playing tricks on my hearing, shaping words that just barely eluded understanding. I thought I heard my name, screamed out by the angry voices in the darkness, accompanied by dim figures that flickered in the edges of my vision, skirting the edges of my sight but vanishing like a trick of the light when I tried to look at them, and always pressing in, in, in.

Then a pair of shadow-flickering hands emerged from the darkness, reaching for me, groping about in wide, blind circles as they searched for me. I struck back, panicked and 

I got in a solid blow and the hands released me. But words were coalescing out of the random din beating down around my ears, forming something logical out of white noise.

“Harry! _Harry!_ Stop it, it’s me!”

I stopped dead, frozen in place while my mind struggled to change gears. The questing hands emerged again, more tentative this time, finding my arms and I moved to grasp them. Warm and human hands, like a lifeline in the storm.

“Molly?” I called, feeling like a lost man staring down a vast corridor.

“Close your eyes!” she shouted.

I couldn’t do it. Like Orpheus with all the monsters of Hades breathing against his neck, I couldn’t bring myself to do it, even as my eyes were going dry and strained from the effort not to blink, and the darkness was closing in on me anyway.

But that was the way to control the effects of the hallucinogen, or else you might spend days walking the same small circles as it played havoc with your sight.

I tightened my hands on Molly’s. Then clenched my teeth and forced my eyes closed, even though it made my skin crawl, imagining what horrors could be oozing up beside me. “Alright, which way is out?”

Our progress was slow, both of us stumbling blind, but we didn’t walk for long. Without illusions to confound us, the room was only as big as it was supposed to be, though the ghosts kept screaming unabated. The uncertain knowledge that they didn’t exist wasn’t enough to make them go away.

I didn’t hear the door open, but I felt the sudden difference in the air, cool, water-smelling wind on my face, and the din faltered. Molly tugged me over the threshold, carpet beneath my feel turning to hard stone.

Some distant, urgent memory made me hesitate, even when all I wanted to do was run and never stop. “Wait, Molly—do we have Bob?”

“Yes, for the love of god, I got Bob! Just keep walking!”

I heard the door close, and with it the last of the screaming was locked away. I was outside. I could feel the cool wind off the lake beating at my duster and sending my hair in all directions, could feel the thin warmth of sunshine on my skin.

“Keep going,” Molly said from behind me, giving me an unsteady nudge. “I don’t know what the range is, and I want to be sure we’re clear of it.”

I edged forward in a blind shuffle and didn’t stop until my foot touched something hard. The pier, I determined when I bent to touch it. Deciding that was probably far enough, I cautiously opened my eyes, squinting at the sun and blinking to clear them, clenched so tightly shut as they’d been.

Everything looked perfectly ordinary. There was a gorgeous sunset forming over the lake, the clouds heralding an incoming storm alight with red and gold rays, but I was still thrumming with the memory of terror and the very tranquility of it felt false and menacing. I looked back at the house. It was bland, clean, completely incongruous with the horrors roiling inside of it. 

Molly, carrying Bob’s bag slung over her shoulder, was cautiously opening her eyes and coming to the same conclusion—that we’d made it out alright. She was dead white and shaking so badly I could see it, as if she still didn’t quite trust her senses.

Her eyes found mine, a dozen questions in them. “Harry, was that... that wasn’t the way it was supposed to work, was it?”

“No, it wasn’t.” Maybe. “We have to move though. If you’re up to the task, I need you to veil us.”

Molly drew in an unsteady breath and closed her eyes, having to focus a moment longer than usual before I felt the veil take shape.

“Harry, where did you learn to make that potion? Had you ever tested it before?” she asked in a whisper, hurrying to stay at my side as we circled around the yard.

“Bob helped me design it,” I said shortly. “And I tested it once—it didn’t do that.”

I’d used it at an empty Little League baseball stadium one night, and it had been weird, but not scary. And far easier to control.

“That didn’t... it didn’t seem like a hallucination. Like, I could _hear_ these people talking, telling me things that there’s no way I could have known. Do you think it could have been... real?”

“I don’t know. Now be quiet, we still have to sneak past the other wardens.”

Though as it turned out, there weren’t any wardens in the front yard. They must have heard Luccio’s scream and gone tearing in there to give her back-up, only to find themselves trapped in the same house of horrors.

Trapped.

We threw the stuff into the trunk of the Hummer, but I hesitated before getting in, torn between the need to escape and my reluctance to abandon Luccio in that place.

“Harry, come on!” Molly urged me, impatience fueled by real fear.

“Luccio…”

“—was not all that concerned about _your_ well-being back there. Get in the car and let’s go, or so help me God, I will club you over the head and take the wheel myself!”

Molly was right—it would be beyond foolish to go back in there now, not with the house to drive me crazy on one side and the wardens to arrest me on the other. I shut out the memory of Ana’s screams as the darkness engulfed her and got in the car, slamming the door behind me.

“Bob, you in there?” I called to the sack on the floor as I fired up the ignition.

“Yes, sirree. Everything okay out there?”

“Just peachy.” I gunned us out of the driveway.

The atmosphere in the car was thick enough to choke on, but no one said a word as we wound out of the neighborhood. We were on the highway headed back to Chicago before Molly brought herself to speak.

“Are you alright, Harry?” she ventured.

“Fine,” I said tightly. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

She dropped her eyes to her lap, choosing her words carefully before she admitted, “I overheard some of your conversation with Luccio.”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Harry, it’s not your fault.”

“I said, I don’t want to talk about it.”

“But I think you need to. I know you were close to her—”

“ _Nothing happened_ between us. We flirted a bit, but it never went anywhere. It doesn’t matter.”

Molly cast her gaze out the window, biting her lip and frowning. “But why would they even do that?” she asked. “Make her seduce you.”

I forced myself to shrug. “Why not? It gives them eyes on the inside, they can keep tabs on what I’m up to, and they’ve got someone in a really good position to take me out, should the need arise.”

A mile passed in silence and then I burst out, “We were _this close_ to sleeping together! Several times. God, can you even imagine what that would have done to her? There I was, thinking it was _romantic_ , thinking that maybe I was falling in love again, and meanwhile she’s trapped inside her own head, _screaming at me_ to stay the hell away from her, and there I am like a fucking idiot—”

“You didn’t know—”

“ _I should have, damn it!_ ” I shouted, slamming my hand down on the steering wheel. “I should have noticed that something was wrong. Luccio had been celibate for centuries, and everyone knew it. She made it a policy to avoid emotional attachments! Then all of a sudden she’s got the hots for me, and that doesn’t set off any warning flags? I mean, what the _hell?_ Had I really deluded myself into thinking that I was just that goddamned irresistible?”

It didn’t matter that I hadn’t known. Even in ignorance, it would have been rape, and the thought of it made me sick with shame.

“Harry!” Molly said over me, reaching like she would put her hand on my arm but then thought the better of it. “ _You didn’t do anything wrong!_ You couldn’t have known, alright? Not without getting inside her head and, oh yeah, there are laws against that.”

I closed my eyes just briefly and then focused on the road as if I could block out everything else. 

“Focus, Harry,” she said gently. “And then tell us what happened to Marcone.”

I made myself take a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Long story short, Attenborough’s got him.” 

I summarized the events of the morning to Molly and Bob, who thankfully kept the commentary to a minimum. 

“Marcone’s going to be pissed that you keep letting him get kidnapped,” Molly observed when I finished.

“I _warned him_ , goddamn it!” My hands clenched on the steering wheel. “I warned him that this would happen if he went in there alone. I just hope he lives long enough for me to say _I told you so_.”

My anger was dying down as fast as it had flared up, too hot to sustain at that level for long. It left me feeling drained and unhappy, but lacking that wild edge. 

“He well might,” Bob piped up from inside the bag. “Survive, that is. It depends on how long you plan on taking to rescue him, but he should be fairly safe for the moment. If Attenborough took Marcone alive, then it stands to reason that they’re not done with him yet, and he’ll be relatively safe until they are.”

“Which could be weeks, or it could be a matter of hours.” What, me? A pessimist? Never. “So let’s hope it’s the former, since we’ll be able to make our move tonight once Gard and the Borlais get here.”

“Ah—speaking of making your move,” Bob cautioned. “You realize there’s only one reason for Attenborough to be holed up on that island, right?”

“Uhm?”

“If he’s made that his base of operations, then it stands to reason that he’s managed to tap the energy from the ley lines there.”

“You’ve gotta be kidding me,” I groaned. “I mean, I knew it was possible—but when _I_ was there the Gatekeeper warned me point-blank that I was not to attempt it, not under any circumstances, ix-nay no way, and that I was likely to blow myself up if I tried.”

“Yeah, well, I hate to break it to you, boss, but Attenborough isn’t you. He’s one of the heavyweights. He could mop the floor with you without even breaking a sweat, and he wouldn’t even need to be turbocharged for that. I mean, you’re pretty scrappy, but this guy has centuries on you.”

“So what you’re saying is that I’d get my ass handed to me even if he weren’t super-powered, which he is.” 

“Pretty much, yep.”

“Great.”

Molly reached across the seat to pat my arm. “ Don’t worry. We have allies coming, and I’m sure you’ll come up with a plan to tip the scales,” she said, with more optimism than I thought the current situation warranted. She paused, then inquired delicately, “You _are_ going to come up with a plan, right? Not just go charging in blind?” 

“I hope so, but if push comes to shove I may not have a choice. He has Marcone.”

There was silence as all of us tried not to think what the likely outcome of that would be, then Bob asked, “Say, did you ever figure out what his endgame was?”

“To start a clusterfuck,” I said sourly, then stopped after the words had barely left my mouth. Because that’s what he was _doing_ , yeah, but there was no way that could be his _goal_ in all this. He had to have an endgame, as Bob put it—no one of Attenborough’s caliber would expend this much effort for anything less.

And yet all this time I’d been running in circles after him, always a day late and a dollar short, putting out all the little fires he’d started but never stopping to step back and take a look at the bigger picture.

“Alright, so what do we know?” I said, thinking out loud. “He’s using Jonathan, probably to engineer a feud of some sort between the Raiths and the Borlais, since there’s not much else that Jonathan’s good for.”

Which I may or may not have been accelerating by bringing Cary into town—my bad. 

“He was using Marcone to broker a deal with Winter,” Molly offered.

“Right, which Bob thought he then planned to deliberately sabotage. Leaving Mab pissed with... who? Only Marcone, or someone else as well?”

And those were just the schemes that I’d managed to stumble across—Bob’s interrogation of Marcone had hinted at others, including even something to do with the Red Court, so who knew what Attenborough had up his sleeve.

Not to mention the deaths of those poor schmucks from M.A.G.I.C. Attenborough had murdered half a dozen wizards in a fashion that smacked of faerie, and I’d almost forgotten about them. They were such minor players that their deaths were senseless and sad, but largely irrelevant—or so I’d thought. The White Council, however, wouldn’t be able to overlook an incident like this, even one involving such low-level practitioners, and if their investigation led them to believe that one of the faerie courts was responsible...

Then a rift between wizards and fae was inevitable, and guaranteed to result in Mab closing the Ways to us, at least temporarily. Without a route through the Nevernever, then the White Council wardens would be effectively trapped in Edinburgh, powerless to intervene when Attenborough and his crew made their move. Meanwhile, Attenborough...

Would still be able to use the Ways, because he planned to use Marcone to barter rights-of-passage for himself. _That_ was what he’d be getting from Marcone’s deal with Winter.

“Stars and stones,” I breathed as all the ramifications suddenly became clear. “This really _is_ the endgame. Everything else was just a sideshow to keep us distracted and force the White Council to spread itself too thin, and now this is it. I think the Black Council is finally about to make its move.”

We drove over the Illinois border; welcome to the Land of Lincoln. 

An ugly thought occurred to me.

“And we’re the only ones who know,” I finished flatly. “Fuck my life.”


	13. Chapter 13

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hearkening back to the author's note attached to chapter 1 -- recall that this fic splits from canon before _Turn Coat_ , but, as in the last chapter, makes use of and echoes certain plot developments in that book.

Yet in spite of everything else that had gone wrong that day, Carolinus and his entourage were still arriving in Chicago at four and I was still expected to meet them at the airport. And since we needed our backup, now more than ever, I asked Molly to drop me off there and then go get Thomas. If Attenborough was holed up on the island, as all signs indicated, then we were going to need water transportation, and Thomas was the only one I knew with a boat. Nor would I mind having someone I trusted more than Lara at my back.

I wound up arriving nearly an hour early. Not O’Hare—please, the White Court don’t lower themselves to rub shoulders with the unwashed masses in such a fashion—but a much smaller, single-strip airfield near the waterfront where Carolinus and company would be flying in on a private jet. It was practically deserted, security consisting of a couple rent-a-cop types chatting near the gates, who looked askance at my staff but didn’t try to take it away from me.

Lara had beaten me there and was waiting outside the terminal with black leather boots and a crimson trenchcoat, her matching lipstick making her look like a sexed-up version of Carmen Sandiego. She noticed me when I came in, since the floor was mostly empty, and idly followed me with her eyes as I ambled over. I saw her nose twitch and then she looked away again, disinterested as I finished my approach.

“Good evening,” she produced eventually, her tone suggesting that she said so only out of her impeccable breeding, as there was really nothing good about this evening at all.

“Evening. You got here early.”

“As will Lord Borlais, I guarantee it,” she replied without deigning to look at me.

Silence.

“I, uhm. I’m surprised you came alone,” I remarked. “I was expecting you to bring backup.”

“If I believed there was even the smallest possibility that Lord Borlais might murder me in the middle of the airport, I would have.”

Apparently I was still in the doghouse, because she made no effort to keep the conversation going and I was left to shuffle my feet in awkward silence. I noticed that the security guards were now eyeing the two of us—specifically, my disreputable self milling about next to Lara, who was obviously way out of my league and whose attitude just _radiated_ disdain. I could feel them itching to tell me to stop harassing this woman who clearly had better things to do than me.

It was twenty-seven sullenly uncomfortable minutes before the Borlais’ jet touched down—early, as predicted. There were a few other landings while we waited, which I’d paid attention to but Lara hadn’t, so it caught my attention when she suddenly straightened, going on alert like she’d scented something on the wind.

“They’re here,” she said under her breath, and all at once it was like a switch had been flipped. You couldn’t tell that she’d been peevish and dreading this meeting, because now she was practically thrumming with excitement. The fight was on, so to speak, and why was I not surprised that Lara Raith was an adrenaline junkie.

It was another ten minutes or so while they taxied and unloaded themselves, but when they finally made their entrance it would have made the dead sit up and take notice. There were about a dozen of them, and they drew the eye with the grace of their movements long before they were close enough to identify, spilling out into the terminal in insouciant duos and trios, some of them hauling baggage and some of them just hanging about aimlessly. I saw a few look up and notice Lara across the floor, but no one took the initiative to come over and say hi. This herd (what was the collective noun for incubi, anyway? a hard-on?) seemed to be lacking a leader and they stayed on their side of the foyer.

When Carolinus finally did appear, the deference in the others’ body language unmistakable. He was the last to emerge, coming off the plane surrounded by a group of four others and deep in conversation with the woman next to him. He looked up when he entered the foyer, his eyes unerringly coming to rest on me and Lara.

“It’s go time,” Lara breathed as he broke away from the group and started making his way over to us. She had some of that lunatic, White Court glitter in her eyes.

“You get off on this, don’t you?” I muttered out of the corner of my mouth.

“Oh, Dresden, you have _no idea_ how much I’d like to get off on that,” she whispered.

“TMI,” I shot back, and then shut up because Cary, Lord of Sex, had arrived.

“Lord Borlais,” Lara said demurely, sinking into a graceful, perfectly-executed curtsy. It was incongruous, not to mention probably really difficult, in her thigh-high leather boots with four-inch heels.

He returned her courtesy with a deep bow of his own, though his eyes didn’t leave her. “Lady Raith,” he acknowledged.

So far, so good, I thought. I had all the social graces of a bull in a china shop sometimes, but the atmosphere didn’t seem too bad to me. Wary, yes, but it was meeting-your-in-laws-for-the-first-time wary, not fingers-on-the-doomsday-device wary.

The two continued to match gazes for a long moment, each of them taking the other’s measure, and it was Carolinus who turned away first, moving his attention to me.

“Which means you must be the wizard Dresden.” He didn’t try to shake my hand and he certainly didn’t bow, not to me. “I am pleased to make your acquaintance.”

Way back when Tabby was first telling me about Jonathan’s family, she called Cary a “handsome older gentleman.” I supposed you could say he was handsome—the same way you could say that Michelangelo was “pretty good” with a paintbrush. He put me in mind of a 1940s film star: classically gorgeous, immaculately groomed, with a confident, sensual intensity and a touch of the old-fashioned about him.

His manner also reminded me a little of Marcone—sexy and self-assured—which helped me to focus. Right, he’s in town to help you rescue your... Marcone. The focus helped, because even when you know it’s all voodoo mind whammy, it’s hard not to get distracted by White Court wiles. Especially coming from someone like Carolinus, who was radiating allure at me in a way that was just a hair too heavy-handed to have been an accident.

And I could see why Lara had been worried—she was clever and quite powerful for her age, but this guy had been a rival to Lord Raith prior to his... mishap. Given a couple centuries Lara could no doubt catch up, but she wasn’t there yet, and I think everyone in the room knew it.

“Alright!” I said briskly, clapping my hands together. “Then unless you two have some arcane White Court pissing match to do now, I’d like to get started.”

Carolinus’s eyebrows climbed, his expression growing almost comically dubious, like he was beginning to think that maybe coming to Chicago had been a mistake if it meant having to deal with the likes of me. “Oh?” he inquired delicately.

“I know where Attenborough is,” I said. “He’s on an island out on Lake Michigan. I’ve been there before, but not since he apparently took up residence there.”

Lara’s pupils flared at the mention of the island and she gave Carolinus a significant look. “It’s a confluence,” she told him.

His brows drew together in a worried frown. “If Attenborough is as powerful as he seems, then...”

“Then he’s probably tapped the ley lines and is now a wizard on PCP, yes,” I finished impatiently. “Which is why some recon would be a really good idea before we go charging in, and that’s why I want to take a couple of your people and maybe one or two of Lara’s and get some eyes on the ground.”

Carolinus considered it swiftly and then glanced over his shoulder at his crew waiting behind him. “Catelyn, Jacqueline, you’ll ride with us,” he said brusquely, motioning two of the women forward. “The rest of you, take the limousine and follow.”

He turned back to us again, visibly dismissing his crew to follow his orders. Then he introduced us to the women who had strode up, catwalk-like, to join him.

“Lady Raith, wizard Dresden”—I couldn’t tell if he was using that as a title or just a designation—“this is my wife, Catelyn, and Jonathan’s mother, Jacqueline.” To her he said, indicating me, “Dresden here is the one who has been helping your son.”

Catelyn looked like she belonged to the same matched set that Carolinus had come from, with strawberry blonde hair in perfectly pressed waves and a glamorous, sexually aggressive air about her. She gave me an enigmatic smile and raked me boldly up and down with her eyes, but said nothing. Jacqueline, by contrast to both of them, looked nearly human. She was still a beautiful woman, but indefinably softer, lacking that inhuman perfection somehow—which of course meant that by White Court standards she must have been downright homely.

I found it refreshing, since I was about to O.D. on succubi and their relentless sexual magnetism.

“It seems I am in your debt,” Jacqueline said politely, falling into step on my right as we all began following Lara to the exit, Carolinus and Catelyn on my left. “You have done our family a great service by coming to my son’s aid.”

“Yes, Harry is quite a good friend of our family as well,” Lara contributed unexpectedly, looking over her shoulder. I had my mouth open to protest, to say that, _uhm, that’s not exactly how I would put it_ , but she caught my eye with a wicked gleam and continued, “Indeed, his mother was my father’s consort for a time. He and I share a half-brother.”

No mention of how Lord Raith had then proceeded to _kill_ _her_ and she had found it necessary to lay a debilitating curse on him, of course, but that was hardly the part that surprised me. For _years_ everyone had been pointedly deemphasizing my relationship to Thomas—you’d think they were embarrassed by me or something—so imagine my surprise when suddenly _Lara Raith_ of all people stands up and practically declares me family.

Either way, the implications of that weren’t lost on the Borlais. An unreadable look flicked between the three of them, as brief and elusive as static, before Carolinus turned to me.

“I was unaware of your connection with House Raith.” Said in a different tone, it might have sounded suspicious, accusatory even, but there was nothing in his voice but polite, studied disinterest—as if the news was mildly unexpected but lacking any direct bearing on him. “I suppose that does explain your willingness to ally yourself with the White Court.”

I shrugged. “You’re not too bad to have along for a fight, all things considered. Though I could do without the blue balls.”

“You must forgive him,” Lara said indulgently. “Harry employs some... _colorful_ turns of phrase.”

“So I’ve noticed,” Carolinus agreed, his tone dry, and they shared a knowing look that left me feeling like a kid whose parents are talking over his head.

I followed Lara outside, where her car, an ostentatious white limo, was waiting in the circle out front. Evening had fallen, the sky turning a deepening blue and the air growing colder, streetlights coming on around the city. I wondered how Marcone was faring now.

We piled into the limo, Lara solicitously taking my arm and seating me next to her, her demeanor casually intimate. Nothing so exaggerated as to be unbelievable, but subtly hinting at our comfortable, familial, and _entirely fictional_ relationship. After the grief I’d already given her, I’d figured that the least I could do was play along—and that there was no profit in antagonizing her further—but that didn’t mean I had to like it.

We’d driven several minutes in silence before I realize that Carolinus had been staring at me the whole time. 

“What?” I demanded.

His lips pulled in a cold smile. “I remember her now,” he said. “Your mother.” 

I felt my breath stop, my chest going tight with the familiar mixture of curiosity and dread that rose with thoughts of my mother. I had never known her, and the secondhand memories I’d inherited from my father painted a very different picture from what I had learned of the woman since then. I never liked meeting her erstwhile confederates, because she hadn’t exactly kept what you’d call good company. Maybe she hadn’t exactly _been_ good company. And as much as I yearned for whatever scraps I could learn of her, I was afraid of what I might hear.

“Lovely Miss Margaret, Lord Raith’s wizarding mistress.” His tone was low and confidential, deliberately soft, so that I caught myself leaning in closer to hear. “How proud he was of her. How he boasted of that conquest.”

I kept my face hard and said nothing. Carolinus was motionless except for the slight movements of the car, beams of passing streetlights sliding over his face. The tension in the air had ratcheted up so high that it was almost difficult to breathe, since this conversation had taken a dangerous turn for Lara too—it was Lord Raith’s relationship with my mother that had broken his power, after all. She had to have been wondering if this was Carolinus’s circuitous way of hinting that he already knew.

“A beautiful woman,” he continued, still in that low, silken voice. “And an unpredictable, and a dangerous one. I can see your mother’s features in you, Harry Dresden. I wonder... how much do you take after her in other ways?”

“I can’t say,” I replied, managing to keep my voice sounding perfectly steady, good job me. “I guess when we deal with Attenborough you’ll be able to judge for yourself.”

His enigmatic smile broadened, though his eyes were obscured in shadow. “I suppose I will.” Then he turned to Lara, all casual charm again, and the electric atmosphere in the car was dispelled as promptly as if someone had opened a window and let it flush away. “Incidentally, this in the first time I’ve found myself in Chicago in a good many years. I wonder if I might be able to impose on you, my good lady, to accompany me while I take in the sights?”

Lara changed gears just as smoothly as Carolinus, and they were off on a thoroughly prosaic conversation about Chicago tourism while I silently let out the breath I’d been holding in. _Damn it, mom, why couldn’t you have dated_ _ **nice**_ _boys?_ Then I wouldn’t find myself walking through a minefield every time I had to deal with a member of their old rat pack.

I didn’t pay much attention to their conversation for the rest of the way to the waterfront, since going sightseeing in my own city was about as exciting as watching paint dry, in my opinion. I did wonder if there was actually some political maneuvering going on beneath their innocuous-sounding small talk, but nipped that thought in the bud—I was paranoid enough already, and that way lay madness. I was, however, fairly certain that it wasn’t my imagination when Lara seemed to be hinting that they could fuck on the Skydeck. Diplomacy, White Court style, go figure.

The waterfront was full of boats but nearly devoid of people when we got there, since this stretch of real estate was mostly for pleasure boats, and not many would-be mariners got the urge to go sailing on a cold and windy Monday night. Thomas and Molly had long since beat us there and were hanging out in his monster truck with the heater on, playing cards and drinking overpriced lattes. The rest of Carolinus’s entourage, and a carload of Lara’s people that had joined us en route followed behind like a caboose full of overlooked children trailing after mom and dad.

They had also, I discovered as I got out, been joined by Gard. She wasn’t waiting in the car with them, instead choosing to keep her vigil outside. She disengaged from the shadows and glided into view when we arrived, which scared me half to death. I almost put a bullet through her out of sheer nerves, but recognized at the last second that the figure approaching was female, and I can’t shoot women. See? My chivalry _does_ come in handy sometimes. She stopped some distance off and beckoned me to join her, so that we could speak in relative privacy, rather than surrounded by the curious White Court.

“Gard,” I said when I was close enough, waiting for my pulse to settle down again. “How the hell did you know where to find us?”

“Your future is writ large, for those with the eyes to read it,” she said cryptically, and shrugged. “There is nowhere else you would be.”

Inscrutable demigods, check. Moving on then.

“Well in any case, I’m glad you’re here. There’ve been some... complications since we last talked.”

“You’ve misplaced my client. I am aware of this,” she replied with a matter-of-fact nod, her face betraying neither annoyance nor censure. 

She was dressed for battle, in black fatigues that melted into the night and a wickedly sharp pair of axes hanging at her hips. She’d tucked her blond hair up into a cap that looked retro military chic—but then, given who she was, I wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d been wearing the same hat seventy years ago for a similar commando raid.

“I would argue that he misplaced himself,” I grumbled, but a guilty conscience kept me from looking her in the eye. “Anyway, you can take that up with him, after we get him back.”

“Your apprentice informs me that you believe him to be at the confluence.”

“That’s where he was earlier, and I don’t see why they would move him. Either way, our bad guy’s there—the one who put the silencing spell on Marcone and the one we have to take out, one way or another.”

Gard absorbed that without batting an eyelash. “If our enemy has made his stronghold at the confluence, then it stands to reason that—”

“Yes, _I know_ ,” I cut her off, before someone could explain to me yet again why we were boned. “It means that he’s found a way to tap the power of the ley lines and now he’s going to be stupid-powerful, and I’m an idiot for even trying to take him on, yes, I already know, so can we skip that and get to the part where we kick some ass?”

Gard was the only woman of my acquaintance tall enough to look me straight in the eye, and certainly the only one who could make me feel small. She was doing it now, giving me a withering, _lord-what-fools-these-mortals-be_ look. 

“I was only going to say that if you wish to stand even the smallest chance of winning this fight, then you would be advised to sever his connection with the well.”

I blinked. “You can do that?”

“No,” she said patiently. “For _I_ am not a practitioner of mortal magics. You, however, could do it with ease, as could your apprentice, or those abominations of unnatural desire with whom you have allied yourself.”

I followed her gaze to the gaggle of vampires mixing between the cars, straight to Carolinus and his wife. He felt us watching and turned to meet Gard’s gaze, giving her a smile and a courteous gesture like he was touching the brim of an invisible hat. Her stony expression didn’t change and it occurred to me to wonder what she saw when she looked at him. Probably not the affable, Gene Kelly wannabe that he appeared to me.

“War makes for strange bedfellows,” I muttered defensively, to which Gard gave a small huff that might actually have been a laugh.

“That is a truth I understand far better than you ever will,” she agreed, something almost like humor in her tone. A moment later she nodded back toward the vampires. “We should join the others if we hope to forge a successful plan of attack.”

I took the hint and loped back over to the cars. Thomas and Molly had climbed out for the meet-and-greet, and I could see my brother off to one side with Cary and Catelyn, Lara’s solicitous hand looped around his arm as she evidently made personal introductions for them. I was a little curious how she’d decided to play that angle, since Thomas hadn’t been in her good books much more than I had lately. 

Molly, meanwhile, was at the center of a circle of Cary’s groupies, mostly women, who were making much of her height and her classically Nordic beauty, and especially her blue and silver dreadlocks. Molly looked somewhat intrigued by all the women stroking her hair, a little turned on, and _a lot of_ uncomfortable.

“Alright,” I called sharply, punctuating that with two loud claps to get their attention. “Order in the court!” 

I briefly considered saying “Order in the whitecourt!” but decided it would probably get things thrown at me.

It took a few seconds for the conversations to die down and for the last of Molly’s admirers to reluctantly let go of the lock she held, and then two dozen preternaturally gorgeous faces were looking at me expectantly.

“Uhm,” I said intelligently, diverting my gaze to Thomas’s boat where it sat moored off the dock, long enough to gather my thoughts again. “So yeah, the situation in brief—there’s a powerful wizard on an island out there who’s made himself even more powerful by tapping the confluence of ley lines there, and it’s our job to stop him.”

Now usually, in a motley crew like this, I would have been stopped by hecklers by now, demanding to know why they had to go be big damn heroes, but the White Court ran a tight ship. None of Cary’s people or Lara’s said a word or even made a face to suggest they’d rather be somewhere else.

“I’ve been to this place before,” I continued. “Lucky me. So I have some idea of the terrain, but I suspect our guy has done some redecorating since the last time I was there. I’d like to do some recon before we all go charging in. Cary, you want to join me for a little scouting before the main event?”

He inclined his head in assent, then raised one eyebrow to cast a glance among the others. “Just the two of us?” he inquired, managing to make it sound dirty.

I ignored the innuendo as if I hadn’t heard it and shook my head, jerking a thumb at Gard. “The valkyrie’s coming too, plus Thomas to drive the boat, with room for maybe one more of your choice.”

Thomas went off to prep the boat—not his big one, but an inflatable raft with outboard motor that could take us over the reef around the island, a reef that would scrape the bottom off any deeper boat—while there ensued a (relatively) short negotiation about who would participate in the scouting mission. White Court style negotiations, which meant that nobody actually said what they wanted or why, or for that matter even hinted directly enough for me to guess.

In the end, Thomas got benched and our starting line-up was me and Gard plus Cary-and-Catelyn. Ostensibly that was so Thomas could be available to pilot the _Water Beetle_ , which would be used to deliver the rest of our troops to the island once we’d concluded our scouting; I privately suspected it might have been more in the interests of keeping Cary’s people and mine evenly matched, though Lara was visibly less than pleased to see me going off alone with Mr. and Mrs. California, and none of her people along to chaperone. She didn’t protest though, just gave her crew the word to start loading equipment from their car to Thomas’s boat.

“Are you sure you’re okay with this?” I asked Molly, pulling her aside for a quiet word while the vampires did their Chinese fire drill. “I don’t trust Lara out of my sight for a moment, and I trust the Borlais even less. I’m not happy leaving you alone out here with any of them.”

“Relax, Harry.” She gave my arm a squeeze. “Lara’s not going to try anything, and she’s not going to let these guys do anything either. Or did it escape your notice that Lara’s been playing it up like you and me and her are bestest buddies now?”

It had not, in point of fact.

“Well, just stick close to Thomas and don’t let your guard down,” I warned. “And you know, I’d be a lot more comfortable if you were protected by the whole true love thing. You should get on that.”

She rolled her eyes hard enough to sprain something. “Right, like you’re one to talk, Mr. I-make-out-on-couches-with-mob-bosses.”

Then she suddenly realized what she’d said and that we currently had no idea whether that mob boss was even still alive. She’d already drawn breath to apologize when I motioned her to silence. The crowd had dispersed to their own assignments and now the reigning Borlais duo was patiently waiting for us to finish our whispered conference.

“Shall we then?” Carolinus prompted, offering a gallant arm to his wife and strolling over to the boat to give her a hand down, like this was some kind of pleasure cruise. Catelyn certainly wasn’t dressed for an expedition like this and wouldn’t have been my first choice; she wore stiletto heels and a heavy peacoat that hit her mid-thigh, theoretically with a dress underneath it somewhere. Just to climb onboard she had to take her shoes off or else risk puncturing the boat. Christ.

And that was how I came to find myself chugging off into the darkness across Lake Michigan in an inflatable raft piloted by a valkyrie, while two sex vampires sat opposite me, posed like they expected to be in a daguerreotype of a courting couple.

We made the trip mostly in silence. The wind here was fierce and bitterly cold as it blew across the lake; with nothing to slow it down, it seemed to cut straight through clothes and skin directly to the bone. I sat in the rear next to Gard, hunched over in my coat with my collar up and my hands shoved deep into my pockets, for all the good that did. And for me it wasn’t just the cold—magic doesn’t do well with moving water, and I could _feel_ the lake beneath me like the hollow emptiness of space, a bottomless well that dragged at my power implacably and inexorably, as though it were slowly sucking me under.

As much as I wasn’t looking forward to arriving at our destination, _at all_ , because I hadn’t forgotten the eerie, sentient malevolence of the place, I would almost welcome it after this boat.

Gard cut the engine before we were even close enough for me to see the island, wordlessly unstrapping a pair of oars from the side of the raft and passing one to me, and we made the last leg in excruciatingly slow silence. The island’s bulk became visible by degrees, a darkness defined by its absence where it blocked out the stars on the horizon, and I felt all of my earlier dread returning.

It had creeped the hell out of me the last time I was there, completely independently of the fallen angels who were also creeping the hell out of me. Even when there had been a bajillion other things to distract me, I had still breathed one huge sigh of relief to be off that place. It was like that sixth sense that tips you off when someone’s watching you, except it was all the time and _no one was there_ , which—let me tell you—will put even the least paranoid wizard on edge. Which I definitely wasn’t. 

What? It’s not paranoia if someone really is out to get you. Then it’s perspicacity.

So when Gard—steering the raft as if she’d been doing it for centuries—brought us to a halt onshore by the simple expedient of running it aground, I found myself having to screw up my courage before I could set foot on the island. I took a deep, fortifying breath like I was getting ready for someone to hit me, and then climbed out.

The pair of vampires slipped out nimbly and silently after me, Carolinus straightening and lifting his face to the sky as if to scent the air.

“An ancient evil haunts these grounds,” he observed unnecessarily.

“Thank you, Captain Obvious,” I muttered, scrubbing at the nervous prickling on the back of my neck. It was eerily silent out here; even the lake seemed quieter, as if the whole island were running on stealth mode. And it was dark, I mean _really_ dark, the way that city slickers like me never quite get comfortable with.

Yet despite that, there seemed to have been a change in the atmosphere. To be sure, the island was no friendlier than it had been before, but this time I could feel its attention divided in some way—like it had been busy with a raging hate-on for Attenborough before I arrived and only spared me a cursory, _Oh yeah, and I hate you too_ before it went back to fuming about him.

“Yeah, whatever,” I muttered, mostly to myself because I still felt stupid for talking to a chunk of dirt. I ignored the looks that drew from Gard and the vampires. “If you want him gone, then leave me alone and let me do my thing, ’cause I’m here to get rid of him.”

As I said, I’d been talking 90% to myself, so I really, _really_ wasn’t expecting it when the island all at once went silent, as if I’d said something unexpectedly profound.

The island didn’t communicate in words, exactly; it felt infinitely more ancient than that, as if the sentience here were older than language itself, hearkening back to a time when its will alone could move mountains. How easy it would be for this entity—whatever it was—to squash me like a bug. And how it must rage at having been harnessed by the likes of Attenborough.

 _Are you?_ it seemed to ask me. _Are you truly here to destroy him?_

“Well, that is the game plan. Not sure how I’m going to manage it just yet.” There didn’t seem to be any point in fronting, not to a creature like this.

The moments passed, the silence broken only by the hushed sound of waves lapping against the shore. My nerves were stretched to breaking, because if the island decided to kick our asses to the curb—with our without extreme prejudice—then this rescue mission would be over before it began. Gard still looked unperturbed, but Cary and Catelyn seemed to have sensed the change in the air, because they were as tense as cats in an empty bathtub, ready on a moment’s notice to throw themselves bodily into the lake and take their chances with swimming back to Chicago.

 _Very well,_ the island decided with its deep, sub-audible rumble. _I will aid you._

No sooner had I understood that then all at once I was hit full-force by a flood of images, old and new, mundane and arcane, of earth and animal and man, a torrent that I couldn’t even begin to understand. Memories of stone breaking from the water here and a gnarled hand— _a creature that was ancient when this land was newly-made—_ pressing a palm against barren rock for the first time, touching the soul of this place and claiming it.

And what use were words, really, when it had existed for time outside of mind before them? So many years, decades, centuries, millennia, an eternity that defied the imagination, before the first human voice was heard on this shore. Time poured through my mind like a river bursting from its banks, so many fragments of memories, images without context.

I saw a man, gnarled and ancient, who dragged his withered body barefoot to the summit. His shrunken arms and neck were weighted with countless leather-threaded amulets, bronze and bone and shell that clinked together musically as he trudged through the forest, frosted underbrush crunching beneath his bare feet. Yet there was still power in his husk of a body, for when he reached the top he spoke words in a long-forgotten language and the island blazed like the sun. It burned him up, the power that he had unleashed, and he stretched his arms to the sky and died laughing.

I saw smugglers, bootleggers, quickly and silently unloading wooden crates from a low-bottomed barge under the cover of darkness. One man looked up in a sudden jerk, only his eyes visible in the starlight, wide and wild as he vainly scanned the stark and unrelenting darkness of the trees for whatever had spooked him. His eyes and skin were dark, his hair black and curly under his cap. After a moment he crossed himself and swore in silence that if he left this place alive (he did) then he would never, ever return (he didn’t).

I saw water pooled in a brilliantly red leaf, spotted brown with impending decay. There was a muted tremor, like distant hoofbeats, that began as the faintest vibration and grew until the water danced across the surface, until the leaf curled and withered, blackening at the edges, the water boiling away to steam.

I saw, this time through the eyes of the island’s presence made manifest, a woman wearing nothing but a cloth around her loins, stretched out with her back against the earth and singing as her fingers and toes burrowed into the moist ground. She felt my approach and her song fell silent. She sat bolt upright, lithe and fierce, this half-wild woman whose veins thrummed with power, who had forced me into human shape, whose gaze roamed over me now as her breath quickened and caught on her lips. No fear at all, only feral, glittering anticipation and desire so strong it was a hunger. No longer young, she, but her limbs were firm and strong as she shuddered, throwing back her head and opening her legs to me like an offering.

Those, and so many others.

And then without warning I was back in myself, reeling blind from the assault of all that knowledge. I would have fallen on my ass if someone—Gard, I knew with sudden and inexplicable certainty—hadn’t caught my arm. Her eyes were narrowed, her posture on full alert, scanning the forest for signs of attack. I knew it without opening my eyes. Carolinus and Catelyn had dropped into identical, mirrored defensive stances, their eyes narrowed and feral. In the darkened cover of the forest, a fox stood as motionless as a stone and watched us, strangers on its shore. Several yards off, the gentle waves had almost pried the boat loose from the sand. All this I knew, as easily as breathing.

“Gard, get the...” _Boat_ , I was going to say, _before it floats away,_ but just as quickly I also knew that the currents around this island, stymied by the reef, weren’t going to do any worse to the boat than push it a few feet down the beach.

I blinked as my vision cleared, and found myself looking into Gard’s set, expressionless face. She was still holding me upright with one rigid hand clamped around my bicep, but loosened her grip slightly when she saw my eyes open.

“It’s alright,” I managed, drawing in a breath and releasing it slowly, trying to find my center again after having lost myself in the deluge of the island’s memories. “It’s...” I groped for a word to explain what had happened, and found myself suddenly at an utter loss.

It was... 

Everything. I knew _everything._

The idle thought had crossed my mind to wonder what was out there in the forest, and suddenly the answer had just come to me, encyclopedic in its breadth and clarity, the placement of every tree, every rock, every wary nighttime animal prowling through the brush. I just _knew_ it, an exhaustive catalog of information that I had no business knowing. Where had this inexplicable knowledge even come fr—

And then I knew the answer to that too. This was what the island had meant by ‘aid.’ No fog of war for me, but immediate and comprehensive intelligence on every last detail of my enemy’s operations.

Hot damn, it was about _time_ something went my way.

“I am omniscient,” I announced, still rather staggered by this turn of events. I shook off Gard’s hand and took a few unsteady steps under my own power.

Cary and Catelyn, perhaps unsurprisingly, were somewhat less than willing to take that at face value. “I beg your pardon?” Carolinus asked stiffly.

The visions I had just seen had humbled me, so I simply tried to explain as best I could. “It’s... the entity of this place just did something to me. I don’t know what, but now I _know_ everything that’s happening anywhere on the island.”

No sooner had I said _anywhere on the island_ then suddenly—

Attenborough, check, at the confluence of ley lines; demons, sixteen of them—that was news!— stalking about in concentric patrols; wards scattered across the terrain like landmines, ready to blow to pieces anyone not of Attenborough’s cadre; and Marcone was up there, locked in a dark and ruined room in the ghost town at the summit, alive and scared, how could he not be, considering how badly this place had _fucked him up_ last time, but transmuting fear into cold, banked rage because that’s how men like him deal with fear, and the part of me that was still _me_ breathed a huge sigh of relief at the knowledge that he was still alive, but my consciousness was already spilling ahead like a wave; other wizards, over a dozen, lackeys or thralls of Attenborough’s whose names came to me as easily as reading them off a list— _Blackburn, Solis, Camacho..._

I had to make a concerted effort to break it off, or else it could have gone on forever in shrinking degrees of detail. I shook my head to clear it, feeling like Mouse coming up out of the bath, and found both vampires giving me identical looks of politely appalled skepticism, like it was an expression they’d learned in White Court finishing school. Then Catelyn looked to Carolinus, who met her eye and something passed between the two of them. Gard merely watched me in silence, both hands resting on the hafts of her axes. As if there was a chance she might have to use them on me.

“You are telling us,” Carolinus reiterated slowly, in a _let me be sure I’ve got this right_ tone, as if he were talking to an idiot or a very small child, “that the genius loci, the numen spirit of this place, has chosen _you_ for the gift of Intellectus.”

And here I’d been expecting them to call bullshit on such thing even being possible—seriously, _I’d_ never heard of anything like it before—when instead his only beef was that the island had given the prize to a dork like me.

“Sure, if that’s what you want to call it,” I said agreeably.

Carolinus snorted and ran a hand through his already perfectly arranged hair, tossing a glance to Catelyn as if looking to her to back him up. “The sentience of this place is ancient, steeped in dark and powerful magic, proud and deeply distrustful of humans. I find it highly unlikely that it would do such a thing.”

“You want to test me? I’m game,” I challenged, starting to get annoyed. “Only there are sixteen demons patrolling this island, so the longer we stand here arguing the more likely one of them is to wander by and notice us, which would make this whole covert-scouting exercise a moot point.”

He eyed me for a few moments, his gaze sharp and piercing and reminding me acutely that he wasn’t the patriarch of the West Coast for nothing. I’d gotten worse from Marcone though, so I wasn’t about to get stared down.

“Alright,” he said at last. “How many weapons am I carrying?”

The answer was a bit of a surprise, but came to me immediately. “Only one. A knife, strapped to your right wrist, with a four-inch long blade and a metal handle with holes in it for your fingers. Also, there’s something funny about your ring. I don’t know if it counts as a weapon or not, but I get the feeling that in a fight, I ought to pay more attention to that than to the knife.”

Carolinus said nothing when I finished, merely watched me, fixed and impassive, as if I’d missed something and he was waiting for me to notice my error. But I hadn’t.

“What?” I demanded, spreading my arms. “You know I’m right.”

Finally he conceded. “Indeed you are.” He looked to Catelyn. “My dear, would you like to verify for yourself?”

She stepped forward to join her mate, linking her arm through his and letting her hips jut out. “What color is my underwear?”

“I—” The knowledge was instantaneous and I felt my face heat. Freaking succubi. “Trick question. You’re not _wearing_ underwear. Now do you believe me?”

Cary was glowering stylishly, but I’d made my point and it was just petulance by now. “I don’t understand why the island chose _you_ ,” he muttered at last, trying to keep his dignity but just sounding sulky.

If I didn’t know better I would think he was _jealous_ that the creepy-as-fuck island liked me more.

“Perhaps it was won over by my immense personal charm and boyish good looks?” I offered.

Carolinus let that suggestion hang in the air long enough to pointedly eviscerate it, then allowed with polite skepticism, “Perhaps.”

I grew serious. “Actually though, it just wants me to get rid of Attenborough. I’m pretty sure that when I’m done, it’ll be happy to kick my ass out too.”

“If indeed it is as you say,” Gard warned, breaking her long silence to speak, “then it is not a gift that can be rescinded thus. I do not think you will find yourself rid of this place so easily.”

I waved that aside uncomfortably, not really wanting to consider the idea that the island had followed me home and now I’d have to keep it. “Okay, maybe not, but we can deal with that later? Seriously, here isn’t the best place to discuss this. The demons he’s summoned are patrolling all over the island and one of them is bound to stumble across us before long. I vote we go back to the boat and map out a strategy there.”

Carolinus looked somewhat pained. “You are aware that Intellectus is only accessible to you while you stand within the spirit’s demesne?”

Huh. No, now that he mentioned it, I wasn’t. By the look on his face, it seemed to cheer him up that he got to tell me so.

“Tell us of the wizard Attenborough’s defenses,” Gard cut in, showing her first hint of impatience at the alpha-dog antagonism between me and Cary. I was glad he was there to back me up, don’t get me wrong, but it was probably a good thing for everyone that he’d be going back to California when this was over.

“Alright,” I said obligingly, closing my eyes to better picture the ground. “He has... demons. Sixteen of them, to be exact, and each one uglier and meaner than the last.”

“No wizard can hold so many, not by his own power,” Gard observed. “Go on.”

“He’s also scattered wards around the island, not as a barrier—more like a minefield. They don’t seem to be reacting to the demons at all, and they’re probably keyed to ignore Attenborough’s people as well, but I expect any of us would be in for a nasty surprise if we got too close to one. It would certainly alert him to our presence.”

I could feel Gard nod as she slotted that information into her battle plan. “What steps has he taken to secure the well?”

Now that was the sixty-four-thousand dollar question, wasn’t it. I cast my consciousness further, a strange feeling since it wasn’t quite out of body—I’d done that before and I knew what it felt like. It was more like watching a movie reel as it sped up the steep incline, the black fog of ignorance falling away before my every step. There was only one path to the summit, a precarious, staggeringly tall set of stairs cut into the hillside, and Attenborough knew it. I passed his first ward, situated at near the foot of the steps, nothing more than a silent alarm that would alert him to the presence of an intruder. The rest of the staircase sped by in a blur, one more warning ward placed about halfway up, until it gave way to a relatively flat, barren plateau at the top.

And I could see the well, or the confluence, or whatever you wanted to call it—power on a scale that could flatten nations, heavy with weight and age and raw power. In the same way that oil is such a potent source of energy because it’s had millennia of heat and pressure working on it, the confluence was like that, times a gazillion. 

It had been there before but I hadn’t really noticed it except as part of the throbbing, background ambiance of this place, the pulse of the ley lines like a heartbeat deep below the earth. Now, however, whatever magic Attenborough had worked to harness its energy had brought the confluence to the surface and it swelled and spilled power like an open wound. I could see the structure that Attenborough had used to contain it, circles of wood and steel large enough to encircle my living room and then some—solid enough by human standards but miniscule and impossibly fragile compared to the power that it held in check.

The sheer magnitude of the confluence had been the first thing to catch my attention, but I now I realized that we had a more pressing problem—disabling the circle wasn’t going to be our problem if we couldn’t _get_ to the circle, and Attenborough had cut no corners in making sure that it was well-defended.

There were fifteen other wizards at the top, none so strong as Attenborough himself, of course, but wizards in those numbers would make anyone think twice. Moreover, the protective wards he’d set up around the well were strong and they were _vicious._ It would neither let people in nor out unless Attenborough himself permitted it, and it was prepared to tear to pieces anyone who tried. The principle was similar to the defenses on my wards at home, but mine were keyed not to kill humans—

“—and I bet his aren’t.”

I blinked to realize that I was back in my own body and I had been speaking the whole time that I’d been doing reconnaissance.

“And that’s all I’ve got,” I concluded to Gard, somewhat lamely. “If we could get through the wards, it’d be easy enough for you and the vampires to tear up his circle, but I don’t know how we’re going do that.”

Cary’s eyes flicked to his wife and they did their silent communication schtick again. I couldn’t tell if it was a vampire thing or just a long-term married couple thing. “Fifteen men on the inside, you say?” he asked.

“Well, wizards, but yeah. Even if we can get past Attenborough, we’re going to have his backup to contend with, and that’s not even taking the demons into consideration.”

Carolinus looked back and met my eye squarely. “If you can draw off Attenborough, we can destroy the barrier,” he said, a hint of a grim smile at his mouth.

I looked at him suspiciously. “How?”

He flashed his teeth in an expression that wasn’t even trying to look non-threatening. “Trust me.”

“I’m not even going to get into why that’s a bad idea. So you’re suggesting that I do what? Walk up there and bite my thumb at him? Drop a flaming bag of dog turds on his doorstep and run like hell?”

Carolinus shrugged. “If you believe that would lure him out, yes.”

I looked to Gard, but her eyes held no answers before she flicked her gaze back to the vampires.

“And what if you’re wrong and you can’t get the wards down?”

“Then I’ll be unable to break his connection to the well, and he will kill you then return to kill us, likely within minutes of your death,” Cary answered easily. “The fact that I’m willing to commit to this course of action bespeaks my confidence in its success.”

I was silent for a long moment. “I don’t know how you’ll get up there without his knowledge,” I said at last. “He’s placed his mines all over the island. Everywhere except the stairs, and if you walk that route he’ll see you coming from a mile away.”

“Is there no other way to the top?”

“No, only—” I broke off as the island, all unbidden, provided me with the answer. There was another way, but it was straight up a sheer, barren cliff face, six-hundred meters of vertiginous stone to the top. Attenborough hadn’t bothered to place any mines there, because it was patently impossible for anyone to sneak in that way. You’d have to be a professional rock climber, and a crazy one, to even think about it.

A professional climber—or a vampire.

 

After I’d given Cary’s plan the green light—because honestly, I wasn’t coming up with anything better—we piled back into the raft and paddled out a ways to avoid a patrolling demon that had wandered a bit too close for comfort. Cary produced a cellphone from his jacket and sat as far opposite me as the tiny boat would allow to call our reinforcements. I listened to him distractedly, but was feeling too unsettled to really concentrate. 

I hunched down in my coat, staring out across the black, choppy water, thinking about the island and what it had done for me. I didn’t _like_ feeling beholden to such an entity, because I’d owed enough favors in the past to be leery of wracking up any more. To be sure, the presence on the island didn’t feel like the fae. They delighted in deal-making with mortals—to them it was crossword puzzles and soap operas and tabloid headlines all rolled into one. This creature, god or demon or whatever it was, was far too ancient to take any interest in our trivial human affairs. It wasn’t going to screw me over on purpose—though it might do that by accident.

“Mr. Dresden?”

I looked up. It was Gard, watching me, her face entirely in shadow except for where some stray moonlight caught the curve of her chin. The vampires were also watching me, so still that we might have been a boatful of statues rocking on the lake’s windy surface.

“They’ve decided that your brother is going to take his boat and pass by as close to the island as he can manage,” Cary informed me. “He ought not stop, since Attenborough or one of his minions would be likely to hear the engine cut off and grow suspicious, so instead our people are going to exit the boat at its perigee and swim the final distance to the island.”

I turned my eyes dubiously to the lake, water that was pitch-black and broken by wind that was cold enough even without being sopping wet. “Not the best night for a swim,” I said.

He gave me a pointed smirk. “Luckily, we are not averse to getting... a little wet, now and again.”

I ignored him. “How many are coming?”

“Five of my people, seven of the Raiths. Lady Raith herself will not be coming, though she has kindly volunteered some of her people to assist our operation.”

To keep an eye on him, he meant. I wasn’t surprised that Lara had bowed out of a stunt like this one—it was dangerous, overt, and unlikely to benefit her in any way—but neither was I surprised that she’d sent a few more expendable members of her household along, just to cover all her bases.

“And my apprentice? What’s she going to be doing?”

“Manning the boat, with your brother.” Carolinus sniffed. “He insists that he needs a second pair of hands to help him, and argues that if Attenborough should become aware of us, then the boat is our only escape route and ought to be well-defended.”

I let out an internal sigh of relief, silently thanking Thomas for having the foresight to request that. Molly would be as safe there as anywhere, and possibly a good deal more useful if things went wrong—she was strong, but her abilities weren’t geared toward head-on combat like mine.

That, and I wasn’t looking forward to explaining to Charity how I’d brought her daughter along for another battle at the very place where her husband had almost died.

“Alright,” I said. “So we’ll circle round the island and drop you two off at the beach where you need to climb. There are two mines on the shore there—I’ll point them out so you can steer clear of them. Gard, are you coming with me?”

I saw her hat dip as she gave a nod. “I cannot join you when you challenge Attenborough, for he would be certain to suspect a trap, but I would like to accompany you as far as the stairs. If you should be discovered by one of his demons, it would be best if you did not waste your energy engaging it in combat. You must save your strength for the battle with the master.”

I sighed and sank heavily into the stiff rubber seat. “Damn it, I’d forgotten all about the demons.” They really were just the icing on the cake of suck that was this endeavor.

Moonlight caught Gard’s thin smile when she replied. “Rest assured, Mr. Dresden, that _I_ am in no danger of forgetting them.”

“And that’s why you get paid the big bucks, I know.”

“I intend to slay as many as possible before our allies unchain the well—for when they do, the demons will be as hounds off the leash.”

I swallowed, hard. Sixteen demons, minus however many Gard managed to kill in the space of about half an hour, freed from any human control and mad for blood. And we’d be trapped on an island with them.

“Why didn’t you mention that sooner?” I asked, mostly rhetorically.

Gard tipped her head almost curiously. “I would have expected it to be obvious.”

“No. I dunno. I thought they’d just... go away or something.”

“Your green earth is sweeter and more tempting to them than hellfire. Without the wizard’s hand to bind them here, they will retreat when the dawn breaks, but no sooner.”

“Yes, yes, this is all very enlightening,” Cary broke in impatiently. “But perhaps you could see about getting us into position _before_ this dawn you speak of?”

“Oh, don’t get your panties in a wad, we’re going,” I muttered, picking up an oar and tossing the other to Cary just to be contrary.

Our progress wasn’t easy, not in weather like this—the night had grown rougher, and we were wasting half our energy just fighting against the wind. Gard took over rowing for me in short order, since I may have been a wizard, but I was still only human, with human strength. I could see the logic in it, though it chafed to get relegated to the girlfriend seat with Catelyn. I don’t know how long it was before we managed to drag ourselves to shore, where I guided them to a stretch of beach safely between the two mines.

“Make sure your people come up in the middle here,” I warned Cary for about the bajillionth time, at which point he lost his patience and snapped that he’d already told them, and that if they were stupid enough to disregard his explicit orders, then he hoped they _did_ blow themselves up.

We left Cary and Catelyn on the beach divesting themselves of shoes and accessories in preparation for their long climb to the top. Before setting out, I patted down my pockets to make sure I hadn’t forgotten anything. Staff – check, blasting rod – check, ring – check, lots of guns – check. Everything I needed to kick ass and chew bubblegum, except the bubblegum.

“We ready to rock?” I asked, turning to Gard.

The valkyrie was taking similar inventory of her own equipment. “I believe so, Mr. Dresden. Would you care to take point, or shall I?”

I did, since I was the one who knew the island intimately now, and we headed inland, directly into the dark, forbidding tangle of forest. The mines were easy enough to avoid since I knew where they were; although if I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have given us good odds on making it across the island without triggering at least one.

We’d gone less than half a mile before we ran across a demon.

I would have been willing to hunker down to wait until it passed, but Gard nixed that idea. Better to take them out one at a time, she maintained, than to have a dozen of them converge on us at once when the binding broke. I watched with dual vision as Gard deliberately twisted off a low-hanging branch just for the sharp crack it made, while a hundred yards off the demon came alert at the noise. There was something of a velociraptor in its design—as if someone had looked at a velociraptor and said, _You know what this critter needs? More pointy bits!—_ and when it heard the branch snap it dropped whatever had caught its attention before and came tearing after us at a dead sprint.

“Hope you’re good at fighting dinosaurs,” I muttered. I’d hoisted my staff and was readying the first words of a spell, when Gard’s hand came down hard on my arm. 

“No,” she said curtly. “I know that you are a warrior and loath to let others fight in your stead, but you _must_ save your strength for the fight to come.”

“But—”

“ _Do not cross me in this, wizard!_ ” she roared, past any need for stealth, not with the demon keening its approach. “Or you risk destroying us all with your foolish pride!” 

Lightning sparked and raced over the steel of her blades, a brief flash of bluish light that left her face burned into my memory, like an afterimage of staring at the sun. Her features had not changed, but they were no longer beautiful—she had let the mask of humanity slip and something too great and too terrible to comprehend showed in her visage, rage and thunder that could destroy the unwitting mortal who strayed too close.

It startled me, seeing her like that, and so when the demon burst out of the trees I wasn’t prepared for it.

Though as it turned out, I didn’t need to be. Gard was as good as her word, and with a sharp, raking cry like a bird of prey she fell on the demon, a fury of flashing steel. In the end, it took longer for the demon to finish dying than it did for her to deliver the blow that killed it. 

She had taken out one of its eyes and wounded it deeply in the chest before the action even slowed down enough for me to follow what was happening. They came apart and the demon staggered a few steps before toppling over. I think it was attempting to cry out, but it could make only helpless, gasping noises that made me almost feel sorry for it. Gard finished it off at her leisure, picking up one of her axes that had gotten knocked away in the struggle and sauntering over to cleanly behead the beast.

Color me impressed. Beheading’s not as easy as it looks, and _definitely_ not on a scaled, spiked, velociraptor-on-meth clone.

“How much is Marcone paying you, anyway?” I wondered out loud as she wiped the blood from her axes and replaced them at her hips.

“More than you can afford, I suspect,” was all she would say on the matter, and then politely suggested that we should continue.

We ran across one more demon en route to the stairs, which Gard dispatched with no more difficulty than the first. This one managed to make a good deal more ruckus though, and five more were alerted that something was amiss. Attenborough, ensconced behind his wards at the peak, was not yet aware that something had disturbed his watchdogs, but it was only a matter of time.

Meanwhile, working to our advantage, the vampires had arrived. Just as planned, they came slithering out of the surf in twos and threes, pausing on the shore to shed the water from their scant, slick clothing, cocking an ear to listen for threats before they followed up the cliff face after Carolinus.

By the time Gard and I reached the base of the stairs, you didn’t need omniscience to hear the demons’ guttural calls to each other echoing back and forth across the island as they searched for their quarry. The valkyrie saw me safely to the first step, and then checked her weapons again in anticipation of slipping back into the darkness.

“Are you sure you’re going to be alright?” I couldn’t help asking.

She unconcernedly tightened the straps on her holsters. “The hellspawn are no match for me.” 

“What about the wards? I still don’t know what exactly they do, but I know they’ll pack a pretty good punch, even against you.”

“I will hold myself to the paths we have already traveled. I will be fine. You must go.”

There’s no arguing with a valkyrie, especially not when they take that tone of voice. I let her go, and then turned around to face the staircase that spiraled up and out of sight, staggeringly high.

“I guess it’s a good thing I’m in shape, huh,” I muttered to myself, and then started climbing.

I didn’t set off the first ward; I couldn’t disable it, but since I could see its edges so clearly (thank you, creepy island) I could set up a barrier around it to seal it in. I left it there, still cheerfully thinking it was doing its job, and continued upward.

The second ward got the same treatment, while Gard killed two more demons. Whatever the remaining patrols had been crying to each other was apparently a warning, because now they were joining to search in pairs or small packs. Cary and Catelyn, far ahead of the others, had almost made it to the top.

I was close enough by now that I could feel the confluence thrumming through me, bone-deep, almost mechanical in its rhythmic precision. It was a distant sound at first, unnoticeable, but grew increasingly stronger and more difficult to bear with each step I took. It repulsed me—not in an emotional sense, but in a physical one, like the autonomic response that makes you tear your hand off a live wire.

And that damnable omniscience was now telling me, with every step, just how little distance remained between me and my destination, in whatever way I wanted to measure it. Eighty-seven steps left. Eighty-six. Eighty-five. Thirty-four meters. Thirty-three. Thirty-two.

I wasn’t ready yet. Hell, didn’t know how I could be. I was about to walk up to the man who was likely the most powerful wizard in the world right now, considering his stolen power, and spit in his eye and then just hope that I could drag the fight out long enough for an incubus I didn’t much like and didn’t really trust to carry out a plan that he hadn’t confided in me.

What could make this situation worse? Oh right— _everything else about it._ Like how we didn’t actually have a clear plan for what was going to happen once we’d cut Attenborough off from the confluence, just that maybe if we all dogpiled him we could take him down. (What it lacked in subtlety it made up for in simplicity, I thought.) To say nothing of Marcone, who was still being held prisoner behind the barrier. 

I couldn’t keep from using my omniscience to check on him again, and the island readily provided me an image of him. He sat in near-perfect darkness on the dirt floor of his cell, toying with a knife they’d managed to overlook and waiting grimly for his opportunity to use it. 

Alone on the starlit, windswept stairs I found my lips pulling into a smile, despite everything, because I was glad and fiercely _proud_ of this man whose life had somehow become entangled with mine. I remembered what Molly had told me about Ivy, and what she’d said about Marcone— _if Marcone, who was “just an ordinary guy,” could tough it out, then she, the Archive, surely could too, right?_

Damn straight, kid. And that goes for the both of us.

Squaring my shoulders, I picked up my staff and climbed the last handful of stairs to the top. I came out onto wide, flat expanse of rocky ground, interspersed here and there with low, scrubby plants. There was a ghost town here, I knew from the last time I’d been her, but now it was entirely enclosed by the barrier of Attenborough’s wards, which cast a filmy, distorted veil over the interior.

I was surprised by the reaction that my arrival garnered when I came in view of the wards. That is, I was surprised when no one noticed.

Attenborough had set up such a network of wards and alarms across the island that no one, by rights, should have been able to cross without tripping, that it had apparently never occurred to anyone to post an actual, using-their-eyes-to-look-at-things lookout. I approached cautiously, wondering if I needed to throw a rock at the wards to get their attention. I used the omniscience to scout inside Attenborough’s camp, and found all of his people engaged in various activities inside the ruined buildings.

Everyone except Attenborough, I realized with a sudden flare of panic, who was—

“Good evening, Harry Dresden,” said a resonant voice behind me.

I spun around to found myself scarcely an arm’s length away from a shadowed man in a warden’s cloak.

Attenborough smiled. “I wondered when I might be seeing you.” 


	14. Chapter 14

Attenborough wasn’t a tall man, not by modern standards, which wasn’t a surprise since he’d been born several hundred years ago. He carried himself well though, with the powerful, charismatic presence of a Shakespearean stage actor, and his craggy face held impressive gravitas in the moonlight. 

I’d started to take a step back on suddenly finding myself face to face with him, but I made myself stop.

“Attenborough,” I growled. “You know, you’re just the guy I’ve been looking for.”

“So I’ve gathered,” he said dryly. He might even have sounded amused. “And now you’ve found me. What is it you wish?”

I took a deep breath and lifted my staff to level it at him. “Owain Morholt Attenborough, wizard of the White Council,” I announced clearly. “You have knowingly violated the Laws of Magic, the due punishment for which is death. As a warden, it is my duty to see that you are brought to justice. Either surrender yourself for trial, or I will be forced to carry out your sentence myself.”

Even shadowed as he was, I could see him blink and lift his head slightly, evidently blindsided by the sheer stupidity of that. After a moment he tilted his face curiously. “Surely you are... speaking in jest?”

“Nope. Serious as a heart attack.”

“Warden Dresden,” Attenborough said, sounding patient and almost kindly. “I will not surrender, and your power is no match for mine. Surely you are aware of this, and you know that to fight me would be suicide.”

Yeah, that was the one downside to this plan, wasn’t it? I took a deep, steadying breath and drew myself to my full height. For this to work, he had to believe that I was scared and desperate, not that I had an ace up my sleeve. Fortunately, I was doing an _awesome_ job pretending to be scared. Seriously, somebody should have given me an Oscar for this performance.

I swallowed. “Maybe. But I intend to take you down with me—and if I die, I’ve got a big old bullet with your name on it.”

His voice grew hard. “I do not fear your death curse, infant. I have drunk power far deeper than any that your shallow soul has to throw at me.”

“Did you just call me shallow?”

“The ocean is shallow compared to what I have become,” he replied implacably, either missing my sarcasm or unamused by it.

Oh man, why couldn’t the bad guys ever be having an off-day when it was my turn to fight them? I adjusted my clammy grip on my staff. “Then I ask you once more—will you yield?”

He lifted his hand in a plea for patience, palm out like a medieval priest giving a benediction. “We need not fight, Warden. I have no quarrel with you.”

“Oh really? That’s funny, because I’ve got a pretty big beef with you.”

“You speak of your lover,” Attenborough agreed, nodding without surprise. “I think an accord could be easily reached.”

“I don’t know what kind of—”

“Give me your word, sworn on your magic, that you will not interfere with my work here; in return, I will release him to you and ensure that you both leave this island unharmed. That I do swear by my own power.”

That stopped me cold. Because he would do it, too—wizards don’t lightly swear by their magic. If I took the choice he offered, Marcone and I _would_ walk off this rock alive. Guaranteed. It would be easier and a heck of lot safer than the really iffy plan we had now. 

I could take Marcone and just go—and leave the rest of the world to hang. Because there was no one else to stop Attenborough if I didn’t. He would tear apart what remained of the White Council and erect his own world order in its place, to hell with the Laws of Magic and to hell with everyone who would die in the chaos he’d created.

Oh, the sadistic choice. Good to see that some villains could still appreciate the classics.

Attenborough smiled at my indecision. “I am not an unreasonable man, Warden. And you may find that our goals are not so incompatible as all that.”

“Ah, here it comes,” I muttered to myself, pointedly loud enough for him to hear. “The ‘you and I more alike than you think’ speech.”

“I know much of you,” Attenborough continued, unfazed. “You have no more love for the White Council than I do. You detest their rigidity, their hypocrisy, their justice untempered by mercy. You are an iconoclast, an upstart, one who challenges them time and again. And although you seldom win, you are never afraid to step forward and fight for what you believe.”

He paused, holding the silence for a long moment, while the wind whistled over the jagged rocks, buffeting our clothes. Then, quietly, he asked, “What is it that you think I’m fighting for, if not the same?” 

I’d lost my momentum. I’d come in expecting to throw down the gauntlet and be taken up on it without a fuss; it hadn’t occurred to me that he would try to back out of a fight, not with the power he had at his disposal. 

“It doesn’t matter what you were fighting for,” I said. “You crossed a line. You’ve killed civilians, innocents. You used black magic to choke their free will.”

“What are the dozens of lives that have been lost,” he implored fiercely, “when compared to the wholesale destruction that will follow, should the traitors within the White Council achieve their victory? Yes, young warden,” he spat, sounding angry now. “Even as we speak there are shadowed factions whose corruption is eating the White Council from within. And what I have done is nothing, _nothing_ compared to the carnage that will follow if they are allowed to succeed!”

He was talking all edjumacated, so it took me a moment to grasp his meaning. By “shadowed factions,” he meant the Black Council. And if he was working at cross-purposes with them, then...

“You mean you’re not with the Black Council?” 

He snorted, and shrugged as if to indicate that labels were of no concern. “Black Council. Is that how they style themselves? It is a name that will suffice as well as any other.”

“But... you...”

And suddenly everything I thought I’d known was crumbling out from underneath me. Attenborough wasn’t breaking the Laws of Magic because he was Black Council—he was doing it because he believed that was the only way to fight them.

“Warden Dresden,” Attenborough said, unexpectedly gentle. “You are very young, although I’m sure you don’t think of yourself as such. But what you probably don’t realize is that the White Council does not have the immaculate, unbroken lineage that it likes to claim. It has always been a conservative institution punctuated by moments of brief, violent upheaval. It has happened countless times before, and it is happening again now. If I am not the one to seize power, then this Black Council will be.

“Dresden!” he cried, his voice rising again in anger. “I _didn’t want_ this responsibility! But Arthur Langtry and his ilk do nothing but hide their heads in the sand and let the serpents surround them. The time for change has come, whether we wish it or no, and still they do nothing.

“Tell me, then! If you wielded the power that I do, could you bring yourself to stand idle while they hold court over that farce, that miscarriage of justice that they call the White Council! Could you, then, step back and do nothing as they drive their ship into the rocks and bring ruin to everything you hold dear?”

He fell silent, breathing hard, waiting for my answer.

I hesitated. It was difficult not to be swayed by his passion, his obvious conviction, by the seeming logic of his words.  _I could have an ally against the Black Council, a very powerful one_ ...

But then, trickling in like a foul smell, came memories of the Torelli house. Of room after room filled with nothing but death. Some of it quick, some of it terrified and agonized, but all of it such an utter, senseless waste of life. None of them had been angels, but no one deserved a fate like that.

Visions of the wizards on the beach. Small game, too weak for the White Council to care about protecting, but not too small to be used as pawns in a game being played far above their heads.

And if that was what Attenborough considered acceptable losses, then I wasn’t onboard for this. And I never would be.

“Yes,” I said simply. “I could let it happen. If the alternative is you. Because you talk a good game, but no amount of rhetoric is going to justify the things you’ve done, or the number of people who will die if you succeed in starting this war.” I picked up my staff and held it out level before me, a symbolic wall between Attenborough and myself. “And so I ask you one last time—do you yield, and relinquish your claim on this place, or would you have us fight?”

Attenborough didn’t move. “You are a fool, Warden Dresden,” he said saidly.

“Oh yeah,” I agreed under my breath. “No one’s arguing that.”

“Then I accept your challenge.” He tightened his grip on his staff and bowed deeply. “A battle between wizards. Let it end when your body lies broken and your blood feeds this land’s hunger.”

“Don’t count your chickens just yet, buddy,” I retorted, keeping my eyes on him as I made a cautious bow of my own.

He straightened, but didn’t take up a defensive position, merely stood there with his staff at his side. “I will allow you the first attack—it is the least I can do.”

“Oh, you don’t need to do me any favors,” I shot back, but I didn’t wait to finish the line before I attacked, roping as much power as I could control at once and slamming it through my blasting rod in Attenborough’s direction. What it lacked in finesse, it made up for in intensity, the narrow tip of the rod concentrating the flow of energy, and the resulting explosion was as good as anything I’d executed before.

Unfortunately, that didn’t make a damn bit of difference.

Attenborough didn’t even flinch at the impact. I could see him in silhouette, motionless as the fire bloomed up around him. When it died down, he began picking his way across the rubble-strewn ground towards me, and I hastily backed up.

Well, I’d gotten his attention, hadn’t I? That meant the plan was working, right? All I needed now was to draw him off so that Cary and his backup dancers could get to work. They had reached the summit ages ago, watching me talk to Attenborough and growing increasingly nervous at the delay.

I circled around, keeping Attenborough in front of me the whole time, until I had my back to the staircase. Then I turned tail and bolted.

I thought I heard him laugh, but the wind picked up the sound and carried it away. Then, with no warning whatsoever, something struck me solidly in the back, sending me tumbling ass over teakettle down the stairs. I cracked my head hard against the stone cliff face but managed to get my arms out to prevent me from rolling down forever. My head was spinning so badly that I was seeing triple and my vision wouldn’t hold still. I wondered if I’d cracked my skull or given myself a concussion, or both, which would explain the throbbing pain in my head and the staggering vertigo.

Or maybe the vertigo was because I rolled to a stop with my torso hanging halfway off the edge, and now I found myself looking straight down into the dark treetops far, far below.

Stairs were a _terrible_ place to fight, I decided, rolling aside just in time to avoid a wickedly sharp shaft of rock that impaled itself in the spot where I had so recently been. I hadn’t even consciously made the decision to dodge, but the island’s omniscience had warned me and I’d acted on instinct. Glory Hallelujah, maybe I stood a chance after all.

Or not.

The steps trembled beneath me, a fluid ripple that should have been physically impossible for solid stone, and that was all the warning I got before the ground burst upward, bucking me off. For a handful of seconds that seemed to stretch very long I was airborne, scrambling to find myself suddenly _sans_ ground of any sort, suspended in midair with the island spread out far beneath me. And then with sickly inevitability gravity kicked back online, and I was plummeting back down to earth in a fast arc.

If we hadn’t been quite so high, I would have died for sure—as it was, I had just enough time to get my shield bracelet up between me and the rapidly approaching trees and pour every ounce of power that I was worth into it. It didn’t protect me from the impact altogether, but it was the difference between going down Niagara Falls in a barrel versus jumping off the Grand Canyon with nothing.

The trees helped a little, their branches absorbing some of my momentum, but I still hit the ground hard. I slammed into my own shield with enough force to knock the wind out of me, crushing my upraised arm against my chest and feeling bones strain nearly to the breaking point. My shield bounced once and skidded across the forest floor in a rough, jarring slide that made my teeth rattle. Finally I crashed into a large, solid tree trunk and the last of its energy dissipated, leaving me in a dazed, ungainly sprawl at its base.

 _Look, ma, no parachute!_ I thought giddily, lying on my back and watching the branches above me turn circles.

Far above, Attenborough stood at the edge of the stairs and peered down into the forest where I had disappeared. Then he tipped his head back to face the sky and his form suddenly shimmered, losing its solidity to become a winged creature of smoke and shadows that plunged down after me.

That couldn’t be good, I thought vaguely, still dizzy and disoriented from the fall. I weakly lifted a hand, trying to mutter the spell that would veil me—all I needed to do was keep him looking, right?—but I’d never been good at veils, especially not when I was nursing a head injury, and the spell stubbornly refused to coalesce. I let my hand drop and closed my eyes to check on the vampires.

They’d wasted no time once I’d led Attenborough away. At the summit, I could see Catelyn as she stepped out of the shadows where her husband and their minions waited. Fearless, barefoot, placing every step with the delicate grace of a dancer, she walked boldly out into the open space before the wards. Several of Attenborough’s men watched her from inside, mistrusting her intentions and keeping their weapons ready at their sides. 

She stopped, limned by the moonlight like a lone dancer on an empty stage, and then squared her shoulders, turning her head to expose the pale, satin-smooth curve of her neck. She lifted one hand and delicately laid her fingers on the pulse that beat there, then let them ghost downward until they just barely stroked over the hollow of her thoat. Her eyes were fixed on the watching wizards, desire stirring in her gaze. Then she began, each movement achingly slow, to unfasten the buttons on her heavy coat, tantalizing glimpses of bare skin visible between her deft fingers. 

Watching this display, even battered and bruised as I was, gave new meaning to the phrase “you’d have to be dead not to tap that”—apparently, I wasn’t dead yet.

Several more of Attenborough’s lackeys emerged to see what was going on, falling still when they noticed Catelyn, their original purpose all but forgotten. Weapons—staves, swords, and guns—hung from slack hands as they stared transfixed at the succubus swaying before them. Catelyn tipped back her head, her eyes glazed and her lips now slightly parted with each panting breath, with each subtle move of her hips. Using her fingertips, she slowly, slowly drew off her coat to reveal the bare skin of her shoulders and then let it fall, pooling at her feet. A full-body shiver ran through her, her thighs tightening convulsively and her breasts straining against the thin white silk of her dress. 

Attenborough was drawing closer, his shadow-form sweeping through the treetops in search of me, and I was finding it hard to care. 

It was primeval, desire like this—the earliest and most potent human instinct—and it was multiplied a thousand-fold by the alchemy of their White Court magic. As relentless as the pull of the moon on the tides, and just as impossible to deny. 

Catelyn was panting audibly now, her breasts peaked and heavy, desire coiled hot and slick between her legs. She cupped her breasts in her hands, rolling the points between her fingers hard enough to make her cry out at her own touch. She took two staggering steps forward, and this was a performance but not an act, because I could _feel_ how strongly the need had taken root in her, how much she was a slave to it even as she stirred it to a frenzy in others. She dragged her palms down over her body, touching and stroking, pulling the fabric so tight over her curves that it left nothing to the imagination. 

At last she stumbled to her knees, one hand pressed against her sex, the hem of her dress tearing on the rough ground, though she was oblivious to it. When she lifted her head and gazed at the wizards beyond the wards, there was nothing but naked, desperate lust in her eyes. 

“ _Now_ ,” she whispered harshly, trembling. “ _Come and take me_ .” 

Utterly enthralled, the first of Attenborough’s wizards dropped his staff and started forward at a run. Far below them, I too tried to take a step, so entranced that I forgot where I was, forgot that I was lying wounded and wrapped in the underbrush of the forest floor. There was no resisting that call, and I struggled to answer it. 

Then the wizard reached the ward. 

Between one heartbeat and the next there came a flash, sudden and blinding like a magnesium flare. It was followed by a split-second of pristine silence before the sound caught up with it, then he was gone and the shock of his death hit me like I’d been doused in ice water, immediately snuffing out all desire. Before I could even draw in a breath, another man struck the wards, dying just the same way, then a third, then a fourth, all of them rushing forward with the same, fixed sense of purpose, oblivious to the end that their fellows were meeting. And with the island’s senses, I could _feel_ each death, the sudden void where so recently there had been life. 

_Oh no, not like this,_ I thought desperately, rapidly blinking back to awareness of my surroundings. _Not this senseless slaughter, there has to be another way._

Catelyn was laughing, the sound low in her chest and almost inaudible, lost to the wind. She tipped her face up to the sky, her mouth stretched wide into a rictus smile, her eyes opaque and unseeing. She was drawing no sustenance from their deaths, only reveling in their destruction. Like the earliest legends of her kind, the sirens who had long ago lured sailors onto the rocks just to see them die. 

The wards shook, battered with every explosion—and even strong as they were, I could feel them starting to weaken. These were no risen corpses throwing themselves to their doom, these were wizards, and each time they died their power struck the wards with the force of a death curse. 

So many of them, and these weren’t the mindless undead—they were people. 

_You have a lot to answer for, someday,_ I told myself silently, sucking in a breath through my teeth. My vision had steadied, the trees no longer swimming before my eyes, and my head felt much clearer. _But not now. Right now, you need to get your ass up and do your job._

Because Attenborough had seen the flares, impossible to miss in the perfect darkness, and if I didn’t do something fast then he was going to go investigate. And if he found Catelyn before she got the wards down, that would put an end to their game in short order.

“Hey, jerkface!” I hollered, struggling to my feet. “You haven’t gotten rid of me yet!”

At my voice, his soaring shadow-shape turned to circle back toward me again. I’d succeeded in distracting him, but he hadn’t forgotten the magic he’d sensed above; as one, the dozen remaining demons on the island lifted their heads as if listening to a silent signal and all at once began converging on the summit, where the wards gave one last stuttering flicker and then died. 

Catelyn, utterly spent from the effort of maintaining so powerful a thrall over that many wizards, released it and collapsed limply onto the ground. Attenborough’s four remaining allies blinked as though coming out of a trance, and looked up just in time to see themselves overrun with White Court. 

Come on, Harry, _focus_ , I told myself. Working magic was tricky under the best of circumstances, and nearly impossible when I was distracted with all the information that the island’s omniscience kept trying to feed me. This gift, I was beginning to realize, was was a double-edged sword—as I’d learned when it left me dangerously susceptible to Catelyn’s seduction.

I propped myself up on my staff, preparing for Attenborough’s second pass. The stored power in my shield bracelet was entirely spent, but I could hardly begrudge it that, since it had saved me from being flattened Wile E. Coyote-style. That left me with the more complicated procedure of trying to manually power a shield that would counter whatever spirit creature he’d transformed himself into.

I did get a shield up in time, but only barely, and it wasn’t a particularly sturdy one. It saved me from being vaporized when Attenborough screamed through, but couldn’t keep me from being hurled backwards, crashing through trees and brush. 

I was, all things considered, getting a little tired of concussions tonight. 

From the summit I heard a distant hue and cry, the shriek of demons preternaturally loud against the silence of the island, and unbidden, my sixth sense informed me that the battle above had turned into a melee. The first of the demons reached the summit and the vampires were falling back to keep from being flanked. I saw Carolinus handing over his wife’s limp body into the arms of one of his people, heard him giving orders to keep her safe. Then he slipped off alone. 

A sudden, wracking spate of coughing brought me back to myself in a hurry. Apparently I’d inhaled a mouthful of dirt when I hit the ground, because it was catching in my throat every time I tried to draw breath. I sounded like I was hacking up a hairball. This time I didn’t attempt to stand up, just levered myself a sitting position and called it a victory. Laying the staff down beside me, I settled in to wait, pulling out my gun and laying it in my lap, half hidden by my duster.

Attenborough made a wide loop to sail in after me, not extravagantly slow but not in a hurry either. My landing had made a clearing in the forest, and at the edge of it he touched down, seamlessly resuming human shape. He approached me slower, cautiously picking his way over the uneven forest terrain and keeping an eye on the darkened trees around him.

“Warden, I admire the courage of your convictions, but this game is pointless,” he called, in the weary tones of a man speaking to one who refuses to see reason. “I have no wish to do battle with you.”

“Then feel free to surrender,” I offered, ruining the delivery with a cough. Yeah, whenever you like. How about now? Now would be good. 

I checked briefly on Carolinus, who was alone and walking towards the center of Attenborough’s camp. The fighting had moved beyond the perimeter as vampires fled and demons took up the chase, the sound of it distant from where he stood. I silently willed him to hurry it the hell up, because seriously, he was welcome to unplug Attenborough _any day now._

Attenborough came several steps closer, stopping when he caught sight of me sitting there. He stood in silence for a moment as he considered me. 

“I do not enjoy toying with you,” he said quietly, sounding troubled. “But you must realize that this fight will be over as soon as I choose to end it. _You will die_ , Warden Dresden, and all the good you might have accomplished with your life will never come to pass.”

I swallowed, waiting for him to walk just a few steps closer. 

“So I will give you one last chance,” he said, stepping forward again. “Will you not take your lover, take whatever allies you have brought, and leave this place in peace?”

“And one last time, I decline,” I said. “Go fuck thyself.”

I lifted my gun, feeling none too steady, and leveled it in Attenborough’s direction. His eyes found my weapon and his shoulders fell almost imperceptibly.

“A gun?” he asked, sounding nothing so much as disappointed. His fingers twitched and he silently fed more power into the shield between us. “Truly, this mortal toy is the best you can bring to bear? You, our brightest hope, the strongest spirit of our young generation?”

“Flattery will get you nowhere,” I rasped, then aimed and fired.

Not at him.

At the ward, behind him.

It triggered instantaneously, nothing like the quicksilver barrier he’d built around his encampment, but sound and thunder that lit up the night. I hit the ground immediately, throwing my arms up over my head, and even then I could feel the white heat of it rush through the air above me in a burst that made the protective enchantments on my coat crackle and singe. Attenborough had made his wards gratuitously strong, packed with all the stolen magic that he’d had no need to ration, and it hit him with the force of a mack truck. 

It didn’t kill him, but it came close. Even the strongest wizard in the world is, in the end, only human, made of human bones beneath fragile human flesh.

He had been shielded, but not prepared for explosion of that magnitude, and the blast had thrown him wide. It had caught him from the right side, and everywhere that his skin had been bare it was now burnt raw and red. His face had scraped the ground as he was thrown, skin torn from it in reams, sticky with dirt and blood. He lay in the dirt and the muck, fingers clenching helplessly at nothing as he sucked in air through his teeth and struggled just to breathe through the pain.

Clutching staff and gun, I forced myself to stand. There was ash falling on me, charred detritus of the ward. I tried to brush it off, though it only left white, smudged streaks on my coat. I hadn’t been injured by the explosion, not like Attenborough had, but I was bruised, battered, and reaching my limits, both physically and magically. _Cary, seriously, whenever you feel like helping_ _..._

The vampire came to a stop at the center of the circle. At his feet lay a skeleton in the innermost ring, bleached bones spread like a star where they had been manacled to the circle. He stepped over the ring and straddled the broken ribcage before going down on his knees, lifting the skull up from the ground, his hands as gentle as if he were cradling a baby. There was something stirring inside it; invisible to the naked eye, but to the island’s sight it was as bright and incandescently fragile as a caged bird. It rebelled at his touch, breaking into a mad panic and throwing itself at the confines of its prison when he picked it up. 

“Shush, calm yourself,” Carolinus murmured, his eyes gleaming as they roved over the ruined face as covetously as a lover. “You cannot be harnessed by one such as me. Though if you could, oh, what things we might do...”

In the distance, Attenborough clenched his burnt hand, his spine curled and his entire body rigid with pain. He sucked in rapid, shallow breaths through gritted teeth, his eyes clenched shut as he attempted to fight past the agony and push himself to his feet. Even now he was rallying what remained of his power, drawing it into himself to fuel his muscles past their natural endurance. When he had drawn enough, he began walking unerringly toward me. There was no benevolence in his eyes now, and I knew that I would get no more offers of clemency.

I fed more power into my shield bracelet—nearly futile, since I had no idea what sort of attack to expect, but better than nothing. I could see Attenborough with my own eyes now, close enough to make out his hunched form lumbering towards me through the darkness of the forest. 

_Enough theatrics, just do it already!_ I silently screamed at Carolinus. 

In the circle he studied the skeleton for a long, fraught moment, and then let out a breath that was almost a sigh. “Too bad.” 

He closed his eyes and then his body snaked downward, moving almost sensually against the broken bones. Cradling the skull in both hands, he brought it to his lips, working his tongue between the fleshless teeth. 

The soul—for that’s what it was, the butterfly-light essence trapped in that cage of bone—screamed when he touched it. But the kiss was all it took to break the spell holding it captive. 

For the space of a heartbeat, everything seemed to freeze. Attenborough, walking towards me, gave a sudden lurch and brought himself up short. The demons and the vampires were still fighting a pitched battle in the distance, but as if on cue both sides fell silent and motionless, their attention drawn to some imperceptible change in the air. 

Then the soul was simply gone, with a disorienting lack of fanfare. Without it for a conduit, all of that stolen power, strewn so carelessly across the island, sank back in on itself like water disappearing into sand. Still kneeling in the circle, Carolinus laughed mirthlessly. 

“Freed with a kiss, dear child,” he murmured. With a sudden, violent wrench he twisted the skull free, vertebrae cracking, and flung it aside into the darkness. “A pity we couldn’t have done that while you still had your figure.”

Carolinus climbed to his feet, slapping his palms clean on his trousers, all the reverence gone from his manner. He aimed a disinterested kick at the skeleton’s ribs, shattering them and destroying the last trace of a human shape, only a scattering of broken bones left behind. Then he turned his eyes toward his far-off companions and loped off into the darkness after them. 

A dozen yards away from me, Attenborough staggered and nearly fell, dizzy at finding himself suddenly bereft of so much power. I saw him lean heavily at a tree trunk, panting hard as if he might hyperventilate. Then, as if with a great effort, he brought his hands together to produce a few slow, deliberate claps. 

“Congratulations, Warden,” came his voice in the darkness, a touch of rueful amusement in his voice. “That was indeed cleverly done.”

“Thanks,” I said warily. “Funny how it’s stupid if you fail, but clever if you—”

I never got to finish, because all at once Attenborough thrust out a hand before him like he was goddamned Darth Vader and suddenly I couldn’t even draw enough breath to choke. He shouldn’t have been able to do it, damn it, my shields were _up_ , but it was hard to argue with the tightening pressure on my neck.

And hard to concentrate on anything else. There’s something about suffocation that short-circuits the human brain, shutting off the ability to focus on anything else and redirecting all attention to _getting air._ I might have had a minute before I passed out, possibly more, in which to do something clever, but all I could do was fall to my knees, clawing helplessly at the _nothing_ around my neck.

Attenborough pushed himself upright and slowly began making his way toward me, his movements stiff and pained. “Though not clever enough,” he continued, his voice sounding stronger. He stopped, looming over me, and watched dispassionately as I struggled helplessly on hands and knees. “Honestly, child, what did you take me for? I don’t need borrowed power to deal with... the... _likes... of... you._ ”

I saw his form shimmer, the words twisting and blurring the line between voice and thought as he called up his shadow-shape again. With the change, he released his hold on my neck, and in the split second that I might have had a chance to act, I wasted it by sucking in a huge, desperate lungful of air. Before I could even draw in a second breath, his shadow-shape was on me, claws piercing my duster like a pickaxe through cellophane and sinking deep into my shoulders.

I must have cried out, but was silenced immediately by the uncanny, deadening _cold_ that had immediately begun to spread out from his grip. His flickering, amorphous shadow grew solid where it touched me, my own life force being leeched from me to fuel him. I tried to struggle free, but the numbing, seeping chill was working its way down my arms, the nerves going slack, and creeping up my neck until my mouth felt thick and clumsy, helpless to speak the words that might have been able to protect me.

With a powerful stroke of his wings I felt myself suddenly borne aloft, followed by the dizzying awareness of the ground falling away beneath me. My vision was a dark blur, Attenborough’s flickering, amorphous shadowform moving in ways that my eyes couldn’t follow while the night spun around us.

He was taking us to the summit, I realized distantly. Or maybe just getting enough altitude to drop me. I tried to access the island’s omniscience and see, but the cold was seeping into my mind, numbing my thoughts as well, and I couldn’t focus.

I think I passed out briefly, jarred back into consciousness by a sudden impact. I was on my back, firelight at the edges of my vision and distant stars above me, with something digging into my ribs. A moment later the ground shook heavily as Attenborough landed next to me, collapsing immediately back into human shape as if every second out of it cost him. 

He was reaching the limits of his strength, I realized distantly; he was powerful, but no longer omnipotent, and he had been burning through his reserves much too quickly for a man without a plan B. And then just as quickly, I understood what it was.

I was in the binding circle. Lying directly on the bones of the last wizard who had been here.

Before I could move, Attenborough’s hand came down heavily on my chest, physical strength augmented with the last dregs of his power. His mouth was working rapidly, already muttering a stream of low, choppy monosyllables that didn’t even sound like a language, but the power gathering around them was unmistakable.

I heard a scream. I thought it was mine, because I remembered, all at once, how he had done this to me before. The last time Attenborough had killed me. The memory was as vivid as anything I had lived through, but I was a woman, a girl, and I had loved him unconditionally until I found myself struggling to escape his grasp, scraping my wrists raw as I fought the restraints. I could feel the weight of his hands, one pressing against my chest and holding me down, the other on my forehead.

 _I am so sorry, my dearest,_ he murmured, a terrible sadness in his face even as his grip on me was like iron, _but there is nothing without sacrifice._

I could smell his skin and his breath and the wool of his robes where he knelt so close, murmuring the spell that would trap my soul, conduit for the power he meant to harness, bind it to my body until long after it had become nothing but a withered prison.

The same spell that he was working again now. That I was once again powerless to stop.

 _Sorry, Marcone_ , I thought, too dazed to muster up the proper state of mind for coherent regret. _Guess I should have taken him up on his offer._

If I’d taken it, I would have felt like scum for letting Attenborough win, but now he was going to win anyway, and Marcone—

Marcone’s cell was empty.

I had just registered that, when there came a deceptively quiet pop and suddenly the shield around us erupted into flame.

Attenborough broke off the spell immediately, forced to pour attention and power into reinforcing his shield. Keeping one hand clenched around my shirtfront, he wheeled round to search for this new attacker.

But Marcone was already moving, borrowed guns in both hands as he darted fast and low to take up a new position. He didn’t wait for a counter-attack, already tearing off a second round and chambering it. It wasn’t even a real gun, blunt-nosed and plastic, but I couldn’t tell what it was until he aimed and fired again, and a second flare burst into the night. It spiraled toward us, leaving a sizzling trail in its wake, and exploded against Attenborough’s shields, reddish-pink fire bursting all around. Momentarily blinded, Attenborough hurled a counter-attack in Marcone’s direction, but it was all force and no precision.

Marcone rolled easily out of the way and came to his feet behind a low, broken wall. He slid down with his back to the crumbling brick, breathing hard, but I had seen that look on his face before and it didn’t bode well for whoever he was up against. He was not a man who took well to being confronted with his own helplessness, which was what Attenborough had been doing to him from the start—and now there would be hell to pay.

Marcone’s hands were quick and sure as they broke the flare gun apart and shoved another round into it. I saw him lift his eyes to the stars, point the gun straight up and pull the trigger. There came another pop, followed by the pinkish glitter of a flare as it traced a high, harmless arc off into the night sky. 

_Signaling backup?_ I thought vaguely. We had no backup. No helicopters full of thugs with AK-47s, not this time.

Attenborough gritted his teeth in frustration, still holding me down but unable to finish the ritual until Marcone had been dealt with. “Do all of you have a death wish?” he called conversationally, his voice at odds with the murderous precision in his eyes as they roved the darkened ruins for movement, for any hint of movement.

 _Don’t answer him, it’s what he wants._ I would have shouted it, if I’d been able to.

But Marcone didn’t need telling. He was loading the last signal flare; at Attenborough’s voice his eyes flicked up briefly, registering the other man’s position, then dropped back to the gun. When it was loaded he pushed himself to his feet again, crouching low to scuttle along the wall, out of sight.

“You might as well just give up,” Attenborough called, his self-possession back in force. He made a careless gesture and a wave of kinetic force struck one of the houses, knocking it nearly flat, bricks and stones bursting apart in a great cloud of dust. It was nowhere close to Marcone, who spared it only a contemptuous glance.

Attenborough gave a short bark of laughter, though it sounded forced and his teeth were clenched. He tightened his grip on the front of my duster and gave me a hard shake, his eyes still scouring the ruins for Marcone.

“What do you possibly hope to accomplish?” he barked scornfully, his voice echoing over the stark and silent hilltop. “What makes you think _you_ could succeed where a wizard has failed?”

Marcone crouched amid the tumbling stones, eyes narrow as he watched Attenborough through the ruins of a window. He brought up both guns this time, resting his wrists against the sill for balance as he set his sights on Attenborough, and then fired from both barrels.

Even Attenborough’s shield shuddered from the force of stopping three large-caliber bullets and the magnesium fire that bloomed up around us. Marcone didn’t wait to see whether he’d hit his target, tossing the empty flare gun aside and running again before Attenborough sent another shockwave through the space he had just vacated.

I couldn’t figure out what Marcone was playing at with this grim game of cat-and-mouse; the best that he could hope for was to buy time, but there were no reinforcements coming. Apparently this thought had occurred to Attenborough too.

“You’re only delaying the inevitable,” he called. “You can’t kill me, you know.”

Marcone’s face was half in shadow, but I caught the hard curve of his smile. 

Which was when a strange shape crested the hill, an uncanny silhouette limned in firelight, its movements eerie and undulating against the darkness behind it. Then a second figure appeared right behind it. Then another. And another.

Demons, drawn here by the light and the noise. Off the leash and mad as hell. 


	15. Chapter 15

The demons converged on us with magnetic precision. The first one to reach us was a sinuous, slinking creature that moved like a cat, and my brain tried to label it as such even though it had no legs. The second one was almost human in a hideously distended way, and after that I lost count of them. I was still so desperately weak that it was an effort just to make my lungs keep working.

Attenborough swore at this sudden influx of new enemies, hastily shifting his grip on me and drawing power into his free hand. The catlike demon feinted forward, easily evading the shockwave that Attenborough sent at it, its body collapsing flat like water and then immediately resuming its former shape. It made a whip-like motion, lightning fast, and Attenborough’s shield shuddered as the demon’s body struck it.

One demon, he might have been able to dispatch with relative ease, perhaps even two or three, but these were just the vanguard. More were still coming, and he knew that he couldn’t possibly defend himself against so many, not and continue holding me down at the same time.

With a growl of impotent rage, he grabbed me by the front of my duster and used a bolt of kinetic force to send me flying out of the circle, right into the path of the oncoming demons. I tumbled like a sack of potatoes across the bare, rocky ground, coming to a stop right in the middle of the creatures. Free of the circle, I could feel sensation beginning to return at the tips of my fingers but it was nowhere near fast enough.

One spent and exhausted wizard dropped at their feet, versus a wizard shielded and ready for a fight—the choice was obvious. And while they tore me to pieces, Attenborough would make his escape.

Except I wasn’t the only one for whom things weren’t going according to plan that night—Attenborough had woefully underestimated a demon’s ability to hold a grudge. I was tempting, yes; I could see them hesitate as they considered it. But Attenborough’s last orders to them had been to kill me and my allies, and out of _sheer, hellish perversity_ they weren’t going to do him any favors.

One by one, they tore their gazes from me to fix inexorably on Attenborough again, and began stalking forward once more. I saw his eyes widen in the moment that he realized his gambit had failed, heard as he gave a sharp cry. The last I saw was him lifting his staff to draw in more power, before the demons closed in and blocked him from view.

I let out a breath that took the last of my energy with it, sinking against the cold, knobby ground that seemed to me as comfortable as any bed. I was so _tired_ , my body still weak as water from whatever Attenborough had done to me. I couldn’t lift my limbs, could scarcely even close my hand into a fist. Maybe I could just lie there until sunrise.

Then someone was leaning over me, different hands on me as someone pushed two fingers against my neck for a pulse.

“—better not be dead,” Marcone was muttering under his breath. I felt him relax a hair when he found my heartbeat and his hands dropped to grip the front of my coat, giving me an urgent shake. “Come on, Harry, wake up. We need to get out of here.”

“M’alive,” I said, or tried to say, but I think it came out like an unintelligible groan. I batted feebly at his hands, but he was having none of that.

“I know you are, or I wouldn’t be bothering to move you. Now unless you want to spend the rest of your life on this island, all five minutes of it, you need to get up.”

“So tired,” I muttered.

He growled something obscene in Italian, but a moment later he was crowding in closer and hooking an arm around my back, levering me to my feet. I helped as best I could, opening my eyes and trying to fight off the dizziness that threatened. I had to lean heavily against him just to stay upright, like a drunk supported by a friend, but we managed a snail’s pace toward the stairs.

“Why is it,” he said, breathing hard from having to haul my weight along, “that you’re the one with magic, and yet I find myself saving your skin with a _flare gun?_ ”

“Where’d you get it?” I asked muzzily.

“What?”

“Where’d you get a flare gun?”

“First-aid kit,” he said, clearly not the issue that he felt most important at this juncture. “Now can you pick up the pace a bit, or must I carry you like a damsel in distress?”

“How did you know that—”

“ _Later,_ Dresden. I’ll be happy to answer your questions _later._ Right now I’m a little preoccupied.”

We reached the stairs, and began an ungainly, four-legged descent. I wasn’t sure what spell Attenborough had used to keep me down, but strength and feeling returned quickly once I was moving and the blood started circulating through my limbs again. I still wasn’t at the top of my game, but after a dozen or so steps I was able to wave off Marcone’s support and we hurried down the stairs faster than was probably safe.

“What’s your exit strategy, Mr. Dresden?” Marcone asked over his shoulder when we reached the first landing.

“Uhm...”

“Oh for god’s sake, please tell me you _have one_.”

“...win?”

That earned me a worried glance from Marcone. “Did he do something to you?” he demanded. “Because I seem to recall leaving you with more than two functioning brain cells to rub together.”

“Jerk,” I muttered. “See if I save you next time.”

“Mm hmm,” he agreed noncommittally, his bland tone implying loads about his opinion of this particular rescue.

Gard caught up with us halfway down the staircase, vaulting from the rocks above us to land on the steps some distance below; if the omniscience hadn’t identified her a split second after I saw movement, I might have blown her away reflexively—her second near-miss of the night. Or I would have tried, anyway. I wasn’t sure if I had the juice to swat a fly right now.

She eyed us narrowly in the darkness, swiftly taking stock of our conditions as we hurried down the steps toward her. “You are both unharmed?” she asked.

“We’re fine,” Marcone said, in a tone that left no room for disagreement.

“For certain values of ‘unharmed,’” I panted. “Still ambulatory, anyway.”

Gard gave a curt nod. “The demons have fled the field.”

I shook my head. “Not fled. They’ve just got bigger fish to fry now. They’re all on Attenborough.”

She clearly hadn’t been aware of that, but it wasn’t hard for her to grasp the implications. “Then I suggest we leave them to finish the job,” she said decisively. “And see to it that we are gone before they go in search of new prey.”

Marcone nodded. “An excellent plan—lead the way, Ms. Gard.” 

I don’t remember much of the last leg of our trip down the staircase. I had to concentrate on putting one foot in front of the other, all too aware that if I stumbled I could wind up taking an unpleasant shortcut straight to the bottom—and this time I didn’t have the energy to pad my landing.

We found Carolinus waiting for us at the base. With Catelyn’s inert body cradled in his arms, he looked like a fairytale prince carrying his sleeping princess—although they probably would have been better cast as the villains.

I staggered to a halt, breathing hard from exertion. “Marcone, Carolinus,” I said for introductions, vaguely waving them at each other. “Carolinus, Marcone.”

Carolinus acknowledged Marcone with a polite but distracted nod, and proceeded to tell us that the vampires were in retreat, heading down the cliffs the way they’d come and back out to the boat. With Catelyn still unconscious he’d been unable to go that route and had been trying to make his way back to the raft—only he was unsure whether the wards in the forest were still active, and understandably reluctant to find out the hard way.

I checked and confirmed that the wards were dead; the magic that had been powering them returned to the island when Attenborough’s control of the confluence broke. Carolinus fell into step with us, and if the burden in his arms slowed him down at all, you couldn’t tell, since he was still faster than us humans in the party.

We emerged onto the empty beach with the wind coming hard off the lake and carrying small raindrops that whipped against our faces. The moon was bright and full, eclipsed now and then by low-hanging clouds that scudded across the sky. Over the distant horizon, the city lights of Chicago lit up the clouds like a false dawn.

Gard trotted a few steps ahead, whipping her head around to peer down the beach in both directions. “Where’s the boat?” she shouted over the wind, turning back to me.

I had a moment’s panic that we were stranded, but found it again fast enough. The currents had managed to pry it loose from the sand where we’d moored it and dragged it about half a mile down the shore. I told her.

She paused, then looked to Carolinus. “It would be faster for the two of us to retrieve it and leave these three here.”

His lips thinned. “Are they in any state to protect my wife, should trouble arise?”

“There’s nothing to cause trouble,” I said. “The demons are still busy with Attenborough at the summit.”

Carolinus was visibly not thrilled with the idea, but time was of the essence and he offered no further protest. He knelt in the sand, quickly and carefully disentangling Catelyn, and laid her down on the beach. Gard had already broken into a run toward the boat, so he just shot me a glance filled with dire warning and took off after her.

I did another check to make sure nothing was around, then let my legs give out and sank down onto the sand. Marcone followed a few moments later, hunkering down to join me. He was still wearing that incongruous hoodie that he’d been kidnapped in, though it looked like it’d seen a few wars since then and the hat was long gone. I swayed in my seat for a moment, then gave up and leaned into him. He smelled like dirt and sweat and smoke, but his arm around me was warm.

“Check it out,” I said, nudging him with my shoulder. “Midnight boat rides, moonlit walks on the beach—most romantic rescue ever.”

“We’re not out of the woods yet,” he cautioned.

“Spoilsport. You just don’t want to admit that you were _totally_ tied to the train tracks when I swooped in and rescued you.” It wasn’t my best effort, I was too tired for that, but bantering with Marcone was like comfort food.

“I beg your pardon?” he asked, but I could hear his smile. “I believe _I_ was the one who made the daring rescue while _you_ were very nearly a not-virgin sacrifice. But alright—perhaps you do deserve some kind of reward.”

He shifted, keeping his arm around me but turning so we were face to face. Then he leaned in to close the small distance between us, pressing a series of slow, testing kisses to my mouth, as if reassuring himself that I was still there, still alive. I eased into the kisses with a sigh, feeling myself relax, as if he’d loosened a knot in me.

“There,” he said when he released me, tucking me back against his shoulder. “I believe that’s the traditional thank-you.”

“That wasn’t a very good kiss,” I grumbled. Actually it had just been too short.

“Well, that wasn’t a very good rescue.”

“Oh, blow me.”

I could feel his shoulders moving with laughter and he patted my shoulder. “Ask again when we’re off this island.”

Conversation fell off after that and I drifted into a half-doze while we waited for Carolinus and Gard to return. The minutes passed in silence but for the whistling of the wind and the crash of surf, until Marcone shifted beneath me and I heard a faint sound underneath the background drone, like someone shouting. I looked up to see him squinting off into the darkened water.

“They’re having trouble bringing it in,” he said, letting go of me and climbing to his feet. “Stay here, I’m going to go help them.”

Fine by me, I wasn’t going to move if I could help it. I watched him dredge up some deep reserves of energy and jog across the open beach. In the distance I could see the raft with Carolinus and Gard, bobbing violently in the surf, resisting their efforts to bring it closer. Marcone splashed a few paces into the water, waving his arm to get their attention, and I thought I saw Gard tossing him a mooring line.

Then suddenly there was a change in the air, a static charge that raised the hair on my arms, and I turned around just in time to see Catelyn sitting up in the sand. Her eyes were blind and milky white, but her face turned to lock on me with the uncanny accuracy of a snake seeking heat. 

“ _Dresden_ ,” she whispered, nearly a song, and all at once the wind and the roar of the water fell away, their noise distant and insignificant compared to her voice. Eyes fixed on me, she rolled to her knees, the motion almost clumsy, and began crawling toward me across the sand.

The compulsion was rolling off her in waves, fueled by her desperate hunger, and though I fought to keep my thoughts clear, I was already exhausted, body and soul. Some small corner of my mind was still thinking logically, but it was somehow detached from my body, unable to issue the commands that would make me move. All I could do was lie there as Catelyn moved sinuously to cover me with her body, pressing my back down against the sand, her skirt riding up as she straddled my waist and pressed her palms to my chest, lowering her face to mine.

“So warm,” she murmured, but she didn’t have the self-control to prolong it any further. With a deep groan, she opened her mouth and pressed it against mine, her tongue thrusting deeply as if she wanted to devour me, her hips working hard against mine.

I’d been White Court whammied before, but never with such a stark disconnect between mind and body. My body was responding to her, reacting of its own accord, but my thoughts were unclouded and I would have pushed her off me if I could have made my synapses fire. Instead, I was just thinking that it was pretty ironic, in the not-actually-funny way, that I’d survived everything Attenborough had thrown at me only to get eaten by someone on my own team.

Then all at once there was a blur of confused action as something struck Catelyn, knocking her off me. Abruptly released from her spell, I bolted upright, shoving her away and scrambling back across the sand, looking back and forth wildly. 

Catelyn crouched nearby, the heel of her palm pressed to her mouth as if she were nursing a split lip, and her eyes, back to normal now, flashing with anger. 

A short distance off stood Marcone, gun in his hand and trained on Catelyn. He looked _pissed._

“Madam, I’ve no wish to strain our alliance,” he said levelly, keeping the gun trained on her, “but I’m afraid that Mr. Dresden here is spoken for. Lay a hand on him again, and I will ensure that it is the last thing you do.”

Impotent fury flashed over Catelyn’s lovely features, but she just sneered at him and turned away to gain her feet. 

Marcone kept the gun on her for a moment longer, then lowered it. Keeping a careful eye on Catelyn, he offered me an arm up and helped me climb to my feet. 

“I trust she didn’t administer any permanent damage?” he inquired, doing a worse job than usual trying to mask concern with formality and solicitously brushing the sand from my ass.

“Did you _kick her in the ribs_?” I asked. Harry’s brain, sadly not firing with all cylinders, if that was the question I found most salient.

“I was pressed for time,” he said with an unrepentant shrug. He lifted his eyes over my shoulder to level a hard look at Catelyn, and raised his voice so it would reach her, “An unfortunate measure that I hope won’t be necessary again.”

I turned to look at her, barefoot in the sand and naked except for the white slip of a dress she wore, still holding her hand to her mouth. 

“You’re welcome to him,” she sneered, radiating sour-grapes disdain. “I found him... not to my tastes.”

She gingerly moved her hand off her lips, glancing down at her fingertips as if expecting to see blood, and spat off to one side. I realized that they were scorched and blackened where she had kissed me. 

I blinked. “You’re burned,” I said unnecessarily, my overworked brain having trouble putting the pieces together. “How did that happen?” 

“That which has been touched in love is toxic to my kind,” Catelyn said nastily. She slowly licked her scalded lips, pointedly dragging her tongue over the burns as if they tasted of chocolate.

“Yes, _duh_ , I wasn’t born yesterday. But that’s... I mean, it couldn’t...”

It had been the memory of Susan’s love, her touch lingering on my skin, that had protected me before. What I’d got up to with Marcone had definitively erased the last traces of that, so this didn’t make any sense, unless... 

Unless. 

I looked at Marcone, blinking back my disbelief. 

“You?” I said stupidly. “You _love_ me?”

Marcone had been checking the safety and stowing the gun back in his jacket, but at my question he looked up warily. I could see from the look on his face that he was all set to deflect it with sarcasm, but then abruptly his expression changed and he closed his mouth. After a moment’s long silence he asked quietly, “Is that really so hard to believe?” 

“Well... _yeah_ ,” I struggled, gesturing helplessly. “I mean we’ve hardly...”

Because one date and a few romps in the sack don’t add up to the kind of love that’s powerful enough to ward off the White Court. That takes more than sexual passion, more than the love of friends, more than the first blush of infatuation. It takes love born of understanding, the kind that comes from truly knowing a person, knowing their virtues and vices and loving them anyway, enduring and overcoming challenges together, it takes _years_ ... 

I stopped short. 

Stars and stones. He really  had been carrying the torch for me. 

Before I could get my head around that, I was distracted by a low, pained chuckle, and turned to see Catelyn watching us like we were the best kind of television, her eyes glittering with malicious amusement. 

“Oh, this is just precious,” she wheezed, still laughing despite her hunger and the discomfort of the burns, and waved a hand as if helpless with mirth. “By all means, go on.”

It reminded me that if I didn’t want to be having this conversation at all, I certainly didn’t want to be having it in front of an audience. 

“Perhaps we could have this discussion this later,” Marcone suggested meaningfully. He inclined his head behind him to indicate the raft, and Carolinus jogging over to join us. The vampire stopped short at the tableau, wary eyes moving between the three of us.

“Problems?” he inquired.

“Only a small miscommunication,” Marcone replied smoothly. He looked at Catelyn. “But I believe we understand each other now.”

She gave him a brilliant, false smile. “Exceedingly well, sir.” 

I didn’t know what Carolinus made of that, but he took the explanation at face value and turned his attention to getting us aboard the raft. 

It wasn’t easy, since the weather was growing worse and we were all reaching the end of our tethers. Carolinus had to wade out into the surf, buffeted by water that soaked him to the waist with each wave, to give us each a hand up in turn. Catelyn went in first, followed by Marcone, while Gard did what she could to keep the boat from being swept out to sea.

I used my omniscience one more time before stepping off the shore and losing my connection with the island. In the last glimpse I saw, Attenborough was still alive—encircled by demons, on his last legs, but still managing to keep them at bay. I was deeply reluctant to leave while he was facing _almost_ certain death, like some over-confident evil mastermind, but I had to face the fact that I was in no condition to finish the job. This would have to do.

It had started raining by the time Carolinus gave me a leg up onto the boat and Marcone hauled me the rest of the way. Gard snapped the mooring line and the raft was immediately swept away from the shore—if Carolinus had been human he might easily have been lost in the waves, but a moment later he hauled himself over the side, drenched as a drowned rat. 

None of us had managed to avoid getting soaked, not that it would have mattered anyway since the rain was coming down harder now. I floated the possible danger of hypothermia, but Gard told me that as long as we weren’t in the lake itself, the water was only uncomfortably cold, not perilously cold; hell if I could tell the difference. My duster did me no good whatsoever when it was just as cold and wet as everything else—in fact if we capsized, its weight would probably drag me straight to the bottom. 

Conversation would have been impossible even if we’d been in any mood to try, between the wind and the rain coming down now and the loud drone of the motor. I huddled together in silence with Marcone, more for warmth than for intimacy—except that somewhere along the line he’d ended up gripping my hand, or I’d ended up gripping his, and we held onto that like a lifeline through the interminable dark. 

It felt like hours passed before we reached Thomas’s boat. In retrospect, having Gard along was probably all that had saved us in the end; I doubt anyone else could have found it in that rain. I didn’t see it coming, only that one moment the rain was sheeting down in a curtain around us, and the next moment the side of the boat loomed up alongside us. We knocked against it when the waves crashed and a rope ladder dropped down to us.

I went up first, the climb none too easy with my hands numb and the boat rising and falling with every swell. I met Thomas at the top, his hair plastered to his head like a seal and squinting through the rain dripping in his eyes. Wet t-shirt jokes aside, he was a lot less sexy when he looked like he’d had a bathtub dumped over him. 

“Hey, Harry!” he hollered, giving me a hand over the side. “Lousy night for a boat ride—thought you should know.”

My teeth were chattering too hard to talk, but I managed to pry a finger loose for him. He laughed at me and set to hauling up the others.

Carolinus’s crew had beaten us there, unsurprisingly, which meant that the hold of Thomas’s boat was packed with tired and no doubt _hungry_ White Court vampires. I wisely decided to give that a miss and let him hustle us into the wheelhouse up top where Molly was steering. She gave me a brief but genuine smile, glad to see me alive, but couldn’t spare us her attention for long, not with the storm to keep her busy.

“Is this a good time for inappropriate jokes about getting naked together to conserve body heat?” I asked through chattering teeth as the three of us began shedding our soaked clothes as fast as we could peel them off. Under other circumstances I would have balked at stripping down in front of Gard (or Molly for that matter, since she’d had a crush on me not so long ago), but necessity quickly trumped modesty here. In truth, I was cold and exhausted, my skin damp and clammy, and there was really nothing sexy about it—but come on, _somebody_ had to say it.

Marcone, bending over to pry apart the sodden laces on his shoes, managed to produce a ghost of his usual sangfroid. “Mr. Dresden, could we really stop you?” 

Thomas came back with blankets, apologizing because he had a space heater downstairs but there was no outlet for it up here. He was also apologetic about the lack of space, since the wheelhouse was about the size of a generous bathtub and we were trying to fit four people in it—but on the other hand, it’d be taking our lives into our own hands to go below deck right now. We managed, even though we didn’t have space to lie down and ended up having to sit on the floor with our backs against the wall.

After making sure that we were safe and as comfortable as we were going to get, Thomas left again, since there was slightly more room downstairs and its occupants weren’t any danger to him. Gard, perfectly unabashed to be wearing nothing but a sports bra and a pair of cotton panties, settled into a corner with a blanket wrapped around her shoulders. The night’s events hadn’t taken the same toll on her as they had on the rest of us—demigod, go figure—so she kept a watchful, silent sentry, eyes glimmering in the watery darkness even as Marcone dropped off to sleep and I attempted to follow suit.

Eventually my shivering subsided, but I couldn’t sleep. I was chilly and the blanket wasn’t big enough to cover all of me, no matter how I tugged it. The floor was hard, digging into my tailbone and making my butt go numb. I wasn’t used to trying to sleep while sitting up, and the elevation was doing strange things with my sense of balance. I’d never actually understood the term “nodding off” until then, but as I started dozing my head would droop forward until it dropped too far, and then with a start I would jerk awake again, startled and disoriented.

It was miserable. I was exhausted beyond measure but couldn’t fall properly asleep. I hung in a restless half-doze, fantasizing about just being able to lie down _horizontally_ , never mind such luxuries as a _bed_.

I remember waking up once, feeling that I must have been asleep for hours, but the night was still dark and everyone was quiet and unmoving. The windows were fogged on the inside from the heat and damp of our bodies, while rain continued to pelt away from the outside, running in rivulets down the glass. I saw Molly lift a hand to wipe condensation from the windshield so she could see out, and then I fell asleep again.

I woke up when Thomas came into the cabin, because he had to push me aside to make room for him to stand. He was taking over the steering wheel, because we were coming into port and Molly wasn’t comfortable piloting that. I came halfway awake and mumbled something unintelligible.

“Just letting our friends off,” he explained softly. “Then you can have the bunk and get some real rest.”

I don’t remember Carolinus and the others leaving, but the next thing I knew, Thomas was rousting us, pulling me to my feet and then half-carrying me downstairs. The cabin was empty when we came in, a warm yellow light from the bedside lamp as he dumped me on the bunk and tucked me in.

The mattress was thin and hard and smelled faintly like moldy vinyl, but it was bliss. I was warm, dry, and horizontal—and out like a light.

 

When I woke up, the rain had stopped. Beyond the round, nautical windows, the sky was just beginning to lighten. The bed was scarcely wide enough to squeeze in two bodies, but Marcone was taking up half, his back pressed tightly against my chest and his arm hanging off the edge. Both of us were still mostly naked under the blankets; I chose to see it as a healthy sign that my libido was able to take sleepy but interested notice of this.

Propping myself up on my elbow to look past him, I saw Gard and Molly sacked out on the floor. Thomas was nowhere to be seen.

I was still tired, enough that if I’d been at home I would have gone back to sleep, but mind was coming quickly awake as I sank back down onto the mattress. What had happened after we left the island? Had the demons succeeded in finishing off Attenborough, or was he still alive? If he’d survived, had he somehow managed to get off the island? Worry was already starting to set in, no doubt to be followed by panic as soon as I woke up enough to appreciate the situation. 

Hell’s bells, I never should have let him out of my sight. I _knew_ what kind of man we were dealing with, damn it—what if I’d underestimated how much strength he’d had left? What if he’d finished off the demons and escaped? What if he’d torn open a door and gotten away into the Nevernever? Would the White Council help me deal with him, if I dragged Marcone up there and _made them_ look at the silencing spell on him? Even they wouldn’t be able to ignore my accusations after that, but that assumed nobody decided to see us quietly dead before we could talk to the senior council—or that we could trust the senior council hadn’t been compromised.

But that gave me an idea, a way to know at least whether or not Attenborough was still alive. Drawing back slightly from Marcone, I closed my eyes and flicked on my Sight.

Even though I’d known what to expect, the Sight was so immediate and so vivid that I couldn’t keep myself from flinching at the sudden illusion of sharing the bed with a tiger. 

Yet he still _looked_ like himself, in an impossible, absurd way that made me smile. Just as Marcone was asleep, so was the great beast I saw through my wizard’s Sight—elegantly sprawled across the length of the bed, with that touch of vulnerability of a predator in repose. And he was beautiful, just for being purely what he was. The sun coming in at the window, which in reality was still nothing more than a dull gray haze, showed as tendrils of fiery, purifying light that glinted from the stripes rippling over his body. 

And in the midst of that beauty lay the silencing spell, a cord of deep, poison green still coiled around his neck, no tighter or stronger than it had been before, but manifestly not gone. I lifted my hand to touch it, one feline ear twitching in subconscious awareness as I did, running my fingers over the slick, pulsing presence of it.

Attenborough wasn’t dead yet.

I hadn’t even realized how much I’d gotten my hopes up until they came plummeting down again to take up residence as a cold weight in my stomach.

What had I let him do? If he’d escaped, then I didn’t give us good odds on tracking him down again. He wasn’t a man to make the same mistakes twice. He would bide his time, licking his wounds and rallying his forces, and the next time he harnessed the confluence it would be much better defended. He would probably make sure I was safely dead before he made the attempt, and this time he would give me no chance to gain the upper hand.

I closed my eyes and blinked off the Sight, releasing a long sigh. _Damn it_ , I should have seen it through to the end. I’d been exhausted and running on empty, but I’d had him in my sights and then I’d left without making sure the job was done. If he’d gotten away, it would be my fault.

Marcone shifted in his sleep, finding my hand and tucking it against his chest, pulling me along after it. That was obscurely comforting and I relaxed, letting my body nestle around his protectively.

At least we’d managed to rescue Marcone—that was worth something. I closed my eyes, pressing my forehead against the back of his neck, feeling his heartbeat under my hand.

I’d almost lost him. There were so many things that could have gone wrong last night, and if any of them had then I _would_ have lost him, no question about it. We’d been lucky, but this wasn’t his first close call, and I knew better than to think it would be his last. He was smart, strong, and resourceful, but ultimately, still a plain vanilla human batting outside his league—and I couldn’t shake the insidious voice in my head, telling me that it was only a matter of time before that caught up with him. That if I let myself fall in love with him, I was setting myself up for heartbreak when he died.

But apparently he was already in love with me, wasn’t he? And my life wasn’t any safer than his, yet he was willing to take that chance. Maybe I was more skittish than he was because I’d been burned before. Maybe I was afraid that I would end up grieving for him like I had for Susan. Maybe I needed to man up.

I lay in silence for several minutes, listening to the faint wind whistling over the cabin and Marcone’s quiet breathing next to me, feeling his body warm and dry beneath my arm. I couldn’t let myself enjoy it for long though, because I had to get up. I had to get back to the island and see what had become of Attenborough.

I sat up, carefully disentangling myself from Marcone and trying not to jostle him as I climbed out of bed. Unfortunately, all the bumps and bruises of the previous night’s adventures chose now to exact their due, and I found myself sucking in a sharp hiss at the sudden barrage of aches that made themselves known when I tried to move. 

I felt sore all over, like I’d done a boxing match or six, then run a marathon, then run another one. I was stiff and awkward climbing out of bed; my foot caught Marcone’s hip as I tried to crawl over him and it was all I could do to keep from cartwheeling onto Molly. I saw Gard crack an eye, but she evidently decided that I was none of her concern and shut it again.

That managed to wake Marcone, who now sat up, blinking and stiffly rubbing his eyes. He paused to take in the cabin with a squint, like a man on the morning after a bender who’s woken to find himself in unfamiliar environs. He looked disheveled and none too pleased to be awake, though he still better than I felt. Granted, that wasn’t a high bar to clear.

“Your brother brought those in last night,” he said, gesturing toward a pile of folded clothes sitting on the table. In deference to the women sleeping on the floor, he kept his voice to a whisper.

I nodded silent thanks and went over to check them out. There were actually some of my clothes among them, a t-shirt for a band I didn’t like and an ancient pair of jeans, both of them threadbare and paint-spattered. I’d worn them when I was helping Thomas repaint the boat, and forgotten that I’d left them here.

Marcone swung his feet off the bed and carefully stepped over Molly and Gard to come pick out clothes of his own. He and Thomas were of a height, but Marcone was slightly bulkier, so I left him there looking for something that fit and went to find my brother.

We were back at the marina, the _Water Beetle_ snug against the dock and Chicago’s skyline cutting blocky gray shapes in the mist. The storm had passed during the night and daylight would burn off the lingering fog later, but for now the sky was gloomy, just beginning to lighten to gray at the edges, and the air was damp and cool. Everything outside was beaded with rainwater, as I found when I leaned against the railing and came away with my ass wet.

Thomas was sitting up in the wheelhouse, listening to some raucous morning show on the radio and reading a gossip rag. He looked up when I came in, unsurprised to see me, and turned the radio down without being asked.

“What’s the verdict?” he asked.

“I need to go back to the island.”

He nodded. “I thought you might. You were pretty beat by the time you guys got back last night, but I talked to Carolinus before he left. He seemed to think there was a chance Attenborough could have survived.”

“Chance, nothing—he did. The silencing spell on Marcone isn’t gone yet.”

Thomas sighed and muttered a resigned curse, making a slow spin to face the wheel again. I took a seat in the other chair while he fired up the engine and radioed mission control or whatever. It probably would have been better to stand, since the chair was as comfortable as sitting in a plastic bucket, but I was tired and my legs felt like jelly.

Marcone emerged onto the deck as we were circling out of the harbor, wearing a tracksuit of Thomas’s. He nodded to us in the wheelhouse, then went to go stand at the prow, resting his hands on the wet railing and watching the horizon ahead of us.

“He’s in love with me,” I blurted out abruptly.

I really didn’t know what to do with that. I had been expecting that we would coast along as we’d been doing and things would just... happen. Now I found myself behind the curve, so to speak, and felt like I needed to either catch up or drop out of the race altogether. It was a lot of pressure, to know that a man like him felt that strongly about me. It was a responsibility that I didn’t know if I was ready for, being the keeper of John Marcone’s heart.

Thomas glanced over at me with some interest, brows raising speculatively. “So _that’s_ what happened,” he said, with the satisfaction of a riddle solved.

“What?”

“Catelyn. We were wondering how she’d gotten burnt, but she wouldn’t say. She tried to kiss you?”

“She tried to _eat me_ , Thomas.”

He gave a shrug as if to say, _happens_. “So, do you love him back?”

That stumped me. “I’m not sure,” I said at last.

“Well, that’s better than a flat-out ‘no.’”

I snorted. “‘Better’ depends on whose team you’re on.”

He looked at me seriously. “I’m on _your_ team, Harry. I admit, I’m not the best one to talk, but you’ve been single for a long time. You play it off like it doesn’t bother you, but you can’t fool me—I know that you’re lonely. You deserve someone to love, and I don’t care if he’s Genghis freaking Khan, if he makes you happy.”

Well, _I_ cared, but there was no explaining that to the White Court. The same sliding scale of morality that made Thomas the only of my friends likely to accept Marcone without question also meant that he wouldn’t understand  my reservations about the man. I might have tried to discuss it further, but Marcone was coming up to the wheelhouse and the conversation was effectively over.

Rather than crowding the small cabin, Marcone stayed in the doorway and crossed his arms to lean against the frame, bringing the damp, morning-smelling breeze with him.

“I take it we’re going back to the island?” he asked.

I nodded. “Yeah. Attenborough isn’t dead—as I’m sure you’ve noticed.”

As he still couldn’t respond to that, his gaze moved to the water stretching out beyond the windshield. 

I felt myself being drawn to it also. The island wasn’t visible from here, but I could feel it, in a literal way that I hadn’t been able to before. I knew where it was, like the same sense that lets you close your eyes and unerringly touch your finger to your nose. I wasn’t exactly afraid of it, not like my earlier dread, but I was deeply worried about what we might find there. If Attenborough had managed to recoup his strength, then I might have escaped an ass-kicking last night only to let him finish the job this morning. Or maybe when I stepped onto the island I would find that he was gone, out of my sphere of intelligence and fled to god-knows-where. 

“I shouldn’t have left him there,” I said woodenly, shaking my head. “I should have stayed to make sure that he was dead.”

“Don’t be stupid, Harry,” Marcone replied, unruffled. “You were in no condition to take him on when we left. If you’d tried to throw yourself into the fray with the demons, you would have died—make no mistake about that.”

“But if he got away, then he’s just going to come back and do it again, and next time he’s certain to be better defended. We—”

“Then we’ll drop a nuke on it,” he said, weary but firm, raising his voice just enough to override me and resting his hand heavily on my shoulder. “End of argument.”

I almost asked whether he could even get his hands on a nuke, then decided I didn’t want to know. I never could tell whether or not he was joking when he said things like that, but if you asked me to put money on it, I’d have gone with _not._

It should have been a pleasant ride, but I didn’t think I was ever going to develop a fondness for boats. The only times I ever seemed to end up using them were for trips like this, giving me a Pavlovian association between boat rides and mortal peril. 

There was no need for stealth this time, so Thomas took the boat right up to an old, crumbling pier on the southern tip, legacy of the ghost town above. I’d never seen the island by daylight before, but it wasn’t much more welcoming. The brightening sky silhouetted the island’s dark, craggy peak, but made little headway into its dense forest.

We came to a thumping halt, and then Thomas emerged to help me get the rope ladder tossed over the side. As soon as my feet struck the dock, I could feel it.

Attenborough was dying.

Through cunning, strength, and sheer, bloody-minded perseverance he’d managed to outlast the demons until daybreak drove them back, but they had wounded him too badly. Had it been just a matter of his physical injuries he might almost have been able to pull through, but magic draws from a wizard’s own strength, and he had overspent his coin. 

All this I knew immediately, the information coming to me in a silent lightning flash, before the thunder’s roll of emotions could catch up with it. The first and most overwhelming of them was relief, plain and simple—relief that my efforts hadn’t been in vain, relief that it would soon be _over._

Other feelings I was less certain about.  There would be no bringing him before the White Council now, no chance at proper justice for him, and I wasn’t sure whether or not I was glad of that. I didn’t like playing judge, jury, and executioner, but it would be naïve to pretend that the Council wasn’t rotten with his co-conspirators. Better, perhaps, that it ended here—certainly safer, anyhow. Or maybe I was just rationalizing.

I climbed back up on the deck and told Thomas and Marcone what I’d learned, then went to gather my things in anticipation of going ashore. My staff was fine, of course, but the duster was waterlogged and weighed about as much as I did. I fished through the cold, stiff leather for my blasting rod in the inside pocket, found it and tucked it into the waistband of my jeans. (It’s not a gun, you can stick it in your pants without worrying about shooting yourself in the nuts.) 

Marcone didn’t like this plan of mine, that was clear enough, but considering how he had already taken me to task for trying to keep him sheltered and safe, he couldn’t exactly frame a legitimate complaint. He followed me to the edge of the boat and braced his forearms against the railing, leaning over to watch me descend the rope ladder. 

“If he’s already dying, do you really need to go?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said. I hopped off the bottom rung, the knowledge coming to me as my feet touched the wood that Attenborough hadn’t moved. “I need to hear what he has to say, if he’s willing to talk. And also...”

 _No one deserves to die alone_ , I stopped before saying aloud. I didn’t know how to explain that to Marcone—or even to myself, since I doubted it was my company that Attenborough wanted right now.

“What about his death curse?” Marcone demanded. Really, this would have been easier if Marcone weren’t so damnably well-informed. But then, if he weren’t, then we might not be alive and standing here either.

“It can hit me just as easily here as there. Besides, he’s out of batteries.” 

Marcone was visibly dissatisfied with that answer, and squinted off toward the island—no love lost there.

“Look,” I said, feeling tired. “I have to see this through to the end. Otherwise he’s like a roach under the fridge that you already got with bug spray, but it could take days to finish dying, and you’re not going to rest easy until you’ve made sure.”

Marcone sighed. “You do have a way with words. Go, then, if you must.”

I left them to hang out on the boat and set off at a slow trudge through the woods, too tired to set a faster pace. It was strange to be walking through these same trees again, when last night they had been dark and alien and fraught with danger on every side—now, daylight was driving back the shadows and they were just trees, nothing here that would harm me.

Almost nothing, anyway.

I reached the staircase, its cracks and eroded corners more visible in the dawn light, and began the long climb to the summit. I had stop several times to catch my breath, since those were the same muscles I had overworked the night before, and my thighs were burning long before I reached the top.

When I did, I found that the town, too, was less intimidating by daylight. The buildings were smaller, their ruins shabbier, dwarfed by the huge expanse of high, clear sky, just beginning to turn to blue. The clearing was no longer swathed in frightening darkness; instead I could see for miles, an incredible open vista, glittering water stretching away in every direction, a crescent of distant shoreline in the south.

Attenborough was not immediately visible, but he couldn’t hide from me. I found him behind an outlying building, leaving bloodstains against the bleached stones where he’d dragged himself to watch one last sunrise. He had plenty of warning of my approach, since I wasn’t trying to be quiet climbing over the rock and rubble. At some point in last night’s fighting his left eye had been damaged, and he was forced to twist his entire body around so he could see me out of his good eye.

Wounded or not, dying or not, I wasn’t taking any chances with this man, and I stopped with plenty of distance between us.

He was a ruin. I had known his condition from the moment I stepped on the island, but it was markedly different to see it in the flesh. I didn’t even know where to start looking; he’d been burnt, cut, and battered, until it would have been easier to list what _hadn’t_ been done to him. He was filthy, his warden’s cloak mangled beyond recognition, torn and stained with dirt and blood and god-knew-what-else. He’d lost so much blood, it was soaking into the ground beneath him even as it pooled inside his body, a body that had taken too hard a beating from too many quarters. Beyond repair, teetering on the verge of collapse. All that was keeping him alive now was force of will.

“Come to gloat, have you?” he rasped out. It was pitiful, watching how he struggled to keep me in his sight, when he was far too weak to stop an attack even if he saw it coming.

“No,” I told him honestly. There was a broken wall nearby, and I checked to make sure it was solid before sitting on it. “I have my vices, but gloating isn’t really one of them.”

“Come to finish me off, then?” he challenged, pride and defiance in his voice even now.

“Yes, if I have to. But do I?”

At that, he seemed to deflate, sighing painfully and letting his head sink back against the wall, even though it left him blind to me. “No, I suppose not,” he acknowledged quietly.

Several minutes passed in silence, nothing but the monotonous whistle of the wind as it buffeted around my ears, and the island keeping me apprised of Attenborough’s every broken breath.

“I understand why you did it,” I said at last. “But this wasn’t the right way. You can’t beat the bad guys by becoming one of them.”

All of this, it was just such a senseless waste—a waste of life, of resources, of trust. We had a common enemy in the Black Council, but all we’d done was weaken ourselves with this internecine fighting. We could have, _should have_ been allies; only he’d made that impossible.

“Perhaps,” he murmured, though there was no concession in his tone. “But I saw no other choice. And given it to do again, I would.”

Okay, well that made me feel less bad about killing him. 

“Who else in the Council was in on this?” I asked.

He turned his head, though not enough to see me; more like a blind man who acts according to social convention. “What makes you think anyone else was?”

I snorted. “Right, it was just you and your lackeys on the grassy knoll. Do you really expect me to believe you did all that on your own?”

“And do you really expect me to answer honestly, when any lie would serve my purposes better?” he countered, scorn lending strength to his voice. “If I lie and say I acted alone, then you grow complacent in your security while my compatriots watch and wait for their moment. If I lie and tell you I had allies, then your doubts and suspicions will poison you, as you forever search the faces of your friends for treachery.”

I gave a short, humorless laugh. Well, if that was all he was after, then he might as well punch out and call it a day. The White Council was already fracturing under the strain of both. After a few more minutes of silence, in which he didn’t continue, I gave up.

“Then I guess we’ve got nothing left to say to each other,” I said. I took a deep breath and climbed to my feet.

Attenborough worked his shoulder in a pained shrug and didn’t reply.

“Alright, then.” I planted my feet before him, shaking my shield bracelet into position. “Take your best shot.”

I’d lied to Marcone—the strength of a wizard’s death curse has everything to do with their potential, and nothing to do with whether or not they were topped off when they died. _Maybe_ his strength had been so overtaxed enough that he wouldn’t be able to focus it very well. Maybe he would opt for a long-term curse that would make my life a misery rather than blasting me off the face of the planet outright, and how was that for optimism?

So yeah, I was scared. I don’t know anyone who wouldn’t have been, and I couldn’t keep from pouring some energy into my shield bracelet anyway, even though it would be about as much use as a tinfoil hat against a tyrannosaur. But at the same time, I wasn’t just blustering—I really was tired and ready to get this over with, and either he would kill me or he wouldn’t, but I didn’t see any point in dragging it out. I wouldn’t even call it bravery; more like I’d already reached my saturation point for fear.

Attenborough lifted his head to peer at me. “Beg pardon?”

“You’ve got a death curse, right? I assume you’re going to use it.”

“Yes, of course,” he said, watching me curiously, as though he were observing an animal behaving out of character for its species.

Then understanding dawned and his face slowly split into a hideous smile, the expression ghastly for his ruined eye and bloodied teeth. His shoulders started shaking and he was making small, wet gasping noises. For a moment I thought he was choking and going to die right then and there, before I realized that he was laughing. It obviously hurt, because even those shallow spasms made him clench his teeth and hiss with pain, and when he managed to get control of himself again he sank back against the wall. He seemed spent, but his gaze was still sharp and he pinned me with one clear, hazel eye.

“My dear child,” he murmured, exhausted and no longer laughing but still wearing that gruesome smile. “Why on earth would I waste my death curse on _you?_ ”

I don’t know what my face registered. Dismay, perhaps—I mean, it’s not like I wanted to soak that curse, but suddenly the hair on the back of my neck was prickling with the cold, creeping doubt that whatever he had in mind might be much, much worse.

The expression on my face must have amused him because he broke into that horrible, choking laughter again. “Oh no, Warden Dresden,” he panted between gasps, each breath a greater effort as he rushed to get out all of the words left in him, before it was too late. Self-possession had given way to desperation and his voice turned artless and clumsy, choppy like chattering teeth as he struggled to talk through the rising pain. “I don’t... intend to k-kill you. I want you to... _live._ ” A wave of agony surged through him and he had to clench his teeth before he could speak again. “I have... every faith th-that you’ll… finish the job I began… someday.”

Even now, centuries old, defeated and in agony, he couldn’t keep from clinging so fiercely to these last, tattered moments of life as they slipped away from him.

There was no dignity in this. It wasn’t like the calm, serene deathbed confessions of movies; people don’t often die of wounds that leave them clean and articulate at the end. This was ugly and brutal and grotesquely intimate, watching a man of his power and stature reduced by pain and weakness to this shaking, stammering mess. I felt an obscure shame, like I was an intruder witnessing something I had no right to see.

“Oh, and—D-Dresden?” he gasped out. I could barely understand him now, his breath was so labored and the words came in short, choked-off bursts. “I—w-worked— _alone._ ”

With that he finally let go, and I felt his life as it crumbled away from him. His last breath escaped from him like a dam finally breaking and his eye fluttered closed. There was a high, pinched-off sound, like the uppermost edges of a explosion outside the range of human hearing, and then a blast of silence so strong I thought I’d gone deaf. It struck me full-body, with the force of a tidal wave; the death curse of a very old, very powerful wizard.

And then it was gone. It parted to pass around me and kept going. I could feel it rolling away, out over the water until it vanished into the distance—a bullet fired, whose target I couldn’t even begin to guess. Maybe I never would find out who it was that Attenborough had hated more than me. 

So it was over, then. I’d won. Attenborough was dead and I didn’t even have to suffer his death curse. Yet even with all that to be grateful for, the victory had a bitter taste.

I stood there for a long time after, as if expecting something else to follow. Maybe I was having trouble believing that it was really done, that we’d fought so hard only for it to be that easy in the end. The sun inched higher in the sky and Attenborough’s body cooled by degrees, a few bold flies venturing to land on him, drawn by the sticky scent of blood. I knew I ought to do something with him—burn the body, or build a bier, or take it back with me, anything to show the proper respect for this lump of flesh that had once been a man—but I couldn’t bring myself to. I’d tell the White Council and let them deal with it. This was their mess too, after all.

At last I turned to go, leaving Attenborough behind with his thwarted ambitions and his dying riddles. I was halfway to the stairs when I realized that there was a figure standing squarely in my path.

I hadn’t sensed it before because… well, because it had been there the whole time, whether or not it chose to manifest physically. It was taller than any man and powerfully built, the impression of height and breadth strengthened by massive crown of antlers that rose above its brow. I couldn’t define any precise details, my mind shying away from closer scrutiny, so I was just left with an impression of hair as long and matted as Spanish moss, and skin that was dark and corded like cedar.

The genius loci. The numen spirit. The essence of the island made flesh.

I halted in my tracks, the muscles in my legs tensing to flee, though that wouldn’t have done any good. Even if it weren’t strong enough to crush me with a thought, it was still blocking the only way down.

“You’re welcome,” I called to it across the clearing, unsettled. I didn’t think it was going to attack me, but what the hell did I know about the thought process of a prehistorically ancient _genius loci_?

It didn’t move, though there was no doubt that the entirety of its attention was fixed on me. The wind stirred the trailing strands of its hair and I thought it filled the creature’s cloak as well, though I got the equally clear impression that it stood naked.

Just as I was starting to wonder if I should go look for another way down the mountain, the spirit gave a ponderous rustle, like the wind rushing through a thousand tree-tops, and stepped aside for me—a clear invitation to depart. It remained standing right beside the path though, which meant I had to pass by it terrifyingly close. Close enough to catch the scent of earth and musk rising from it, to feel the electric tension in the air from the strength of it.

I had the sense that this was another test, and that was the only thing that kept me from bolting down the stairs screaming like my pants were on fire. I could feel its eyes on me for a long time after, like a set of crosshairs on my back, and I had to fight the urge to keep glancing at it over my shoulder. 

Eventually the prickling on my neck subsided, and when I ventured to look back, the figure was gone. The sense of it remained with me though, even as the intensity of the island’s presence faded until it returned to what it had always been, distant and largely uninterested in humans. Except for me, apparently, whom it watched with a proprietary sort of curiosity. Adopted by a creepy island—just another day in the life of Harry Dresden.

Shaking my head, I turned away and continued down to rejoin the others. 


	16. Epilogue

Of course, it wasn’t just _over_ after that. Attenborough may have been vanquished, the day may have been saved, but we didn’t get to clock out and go home. He’d made a royal mess of things, and we had a lot of loose ends to tie up. 

On the chugboat ride back to Chicago, we compared notes on the previous night’s excitement, finally getting to put the pieces together now that the spell was lifted and Marcone could say whatever he wanted to. 

Turned out, he’d managed to escape the ordeal virtually unscathed. The worst he’d gotten was a bit of roughing up from Torelli’s people; Attenborough evidently preferred reckless laws-of-magic breakage to gratuitous violence. When Attenborough had gotten ahold of Marcone, they’d shaken him down for information, business-like, then locked him up and more or less left him alone. The hut they kept him in was hardly secure and Marcone had picked the lock ages before we got there—for all the good did it do him, since he was still trapped inside a bubble with a dozen hostile wizards. 

We also got, decidedly after the fact, the last piece of information that Marcone hadn’t been able to communicate to Bob—that Attenborough was supercharged. Marcone was familiar enough with me to know what the baseline for  _really powerful wizard_ was, and when he’d seen the way Attenborough was slinging magic around with no thought for conservation, he guessed that the man must have found a way to augment himself somehow. It would have been helpful to learn that sooner, but such is life. And hey, we still won.

When Thomas was steering us into port, Marcone disappeared below deck. A covert glance around showed that Molly was with Thomas, getting a practical lesson in boating, and Gard was standing out on the deck, making this the only moment of privacy we were likely to get before things got busy again. I was dreading the conversation that would follow, but it wasn’t something I could risk putting off. 

I found Marcone taking stock of the clothes he’d shed the night before, filthy from their misadventures, but dry from having hung over the heater for a few hours. I hovered in the doorway for a few moments, wrestling with my own reluctance, before making myself ask, “Are you still mad about Helen?” 

He’d been trying to brush off some of the grit caked to his jeans, but at that, his hands stilled. I could feel his awareness shifting to me, though his eyes stayed resting lightly on the fabric. 

“ _Mad_ lacks sufficient nuance to describe my feelings at the moment,” he replied in his signature tone of dry irony, the one that usually means heads are going to roll.

“She helped me find you, you know,” I said. “Without her help, I wouldn’t have known to look at the Torelli house and I wouldn’t have realized that Attenborough had you.”

“And she volunteered that information out of the goodness of her heart, did she? Let me guess—you told her that her daughter was alive and offered to trade my location for Amanda’s.”

Of course he knew how I’d done it, because that’s exactly what  _he_ would have done, if our situations had been reversed. The thought occurred to me, an uncomfortable idea that I didn’t want to believe, that maybe this was why he hadn’t told her about Amanda sooner: that he’d been saving the secret for a situation exactly like this one, when he would need the only leverage possible against a woman who didn’t care about anything else.

“I did,” I said evenly.

“And did you happen to mention the condition that she was going to find her daughter in?” He looked up then, his pale gaze razor-sharp and nearly rooting me in place. At the look on my face, he smiled, and not pleasantly. “Of course you didn’t.”

“I know I wasn’t fair to her,” I said, feeling my own temper rising as guilt transmuted itself into defensive anger. “And I’m not proud of it, but I would do it again if I had to, because your life was on the line and the clock was ticking.”

“Commendable, to be sure. But it would have been completely unnecessary if you’d thought to inform me of Helen’s betrayal sooner.”

“And I’ll shoulder some of the blame for that, but not all of it. Stars and stones, I can’t believe you trusted her in the first place! How much loyalty did you seriously expect from a sociopath?”

“I was well aware that she had no loyalty to me personally, I just didn’t think she’d found anyone better to throw her lot in with yet. So, tell me—how long had you known?”

“Marcone...”

“ _How long_ , Mr. Dresden?” he bit out.

Ouch, the unironic “Mr.” treatment. I sighed. “Since you came back from the Denarians. I thought it was suspicious how quickly they’d been able to find your safehouse—when I cornered Helen, she admitted that she’d been the one to let it slip.” 

He expelled a harsh breath and cut his gaze away from me in disgust. 

“Listen, I know I should have told you. But then I would have had to explain how I knew, and...” I paused uncomfortably, “I was afraid that you might kill her.”

I wanted him to deny it. I wanted him to get mad at me just for suggesting it, for entertaining the idea that he would even consider such a thing—but we’d always understood each other, even when we didn’t agree. Especially when we didn’t agree. I’d known from the start why I was keeping that secret. 

“ _Yes_ ,” he said bluntly, eyes blazing as they came back up to meet mine, anger lending a sharp edge to his voice. “After what I endured at the hands of her associates? Yes, Dresden, I would kill her in a _heartbeat_. And you have yet to talk me out of it.”

“Goddamn it, Marcone, she’s _sick!_ You knew that when you made the decision to hire her! She’s sick and broken and incapable of loyalty, and you kept her around anyway because you felt guilty.”

“You are not privy to my motives, Dresden,” he said curtly. “Yes, I knew that she was a sociopath—which is why her betrayal isn’t the one that matters.”

No, it was mine. Because somehow, in all this mess, I’d forgotten that Marcone cared as much about loyalty as I did, and I was only just realizing how this must feel to him. Like a slap in the face; like he’d started to open up to me, but I was still playing my own game with him. 

I had my mouth open to explain, or apologize—frankly, I wasn’t sure what was about to come out—when the hatch opened, letting in sunlight and Thomas’s voice. 

“We’re here!” he called down the stairs. “You guys about ready to go?”

“Give us a moment,” Marcone replied, lifting his voice only slightly but packing them with such steely authority that Thomas shut the hatch again without another word. Marcone’s eyes rested briefly on the hatch, as if making sure it would stay closed, then looked back to me. “Well, Harry? Have you anything else to say on her behalf?”

A dozen crazy ideas flashed through my head, plans for storming Marcone’s base and getting Helen out, or for talking him out of it, getting him to trade her life for something he wanted more, there were things I had, chips I could barter with. Every stupidly chivalrous impulse in my body was screaming at me to save her, to do whatever it took, to lay it on the line, to tell him,  _If you kill her, then you lose me—_

But I wasn’t going to do it. I wasn’t going to make that ultimatum, not for her sake. She’d already had her chance; I’d kept her secret the first time around, saved her life, and all she’d done was squander it on more violence, more death. 

This wasn’t even about Helen, really. God knew I wasn’t much happier with her than Marcone was. It was about him—about how he was a man with no qualms about killing, and I wasn’t. Even though I knew that he wasn’t going to change, no matter how this turned out, it was easier to ignore, in some way, easier to justify when the killings were abstract—nameless rival mobsters with consciences as black as his, not a woman whose only original sin was to have been in the wrong place at the wrong time, to have outlived everyone she cared about. 

And, looking him in the eye, I could tell that he knew that too. He understood me well enough to know that if we didn’t find some way to compromise here, if he did kill Helen, then this would be the beginning of the end—the first blow, laying the first, splintering cracks in our fragile rapport, and that there would be only so many blows it could take before it broke. 

“Please don’t kill her,” I said, quiet and tired, past any artifice. “Send her away, put her someplace where she won’t bother you anymore. Just... don’t kill her. Have mercy, Marcone—life dealt her a crap hand, it’s not her fault that she turned out like this.”

Marcone was silent for a long moment. He drew in a breath, then smiled and gave a short huff as something amusing occurred to him. 

“Tell me, Mr. Dresden—are you familiar with the maxim of choosing your battles wisely?” he asked.

“I think I’ve heard it a time or two,” I replied cautiously.

He lifted his eyes to me again, his smile and his equanimity back in place. “I’m choosing to concede this one. You have my word that I will not execute Ms. Helen Beckitt, no matter how richly she may deserve it.” 

I breathed an internal sigh of relief. “Thank you.” 

Marcone shrugged. “There’s nothing to thank me for. I lose nothing by letting her live except vengeance, which would have been petty, if satisfying.” The smile he gave me wasn’t even intended to be reassuring. “I would advise you, however, not to expect such easy capitulation in the future.” 

Well, that seemed like a pretty good deal to me, even if he was making ominous noises about the future. That was then, and this was now, and I’d never been great shakes at planning ahead anyway. 

Thomas dropped Molly off at her house, then went on to take Marcone and Gard, per his request, to a nondescript address in Lincoln Park. 

Marcone and I didn’t say much to each other as he was getting out, not in front of the others, but he shot me a look, guarded and inscrutable, and I couldn’t tell if it was supposed to mean something. In any case, the moment passed before I could seize on it, and then they were gone and we were pulling away again. 

Thomas tried to insist on taking me to the hospital, but I refused—I told him I was bruised, battered, and exhausted, but it was nothing a week of sleep wouldn’t fix, and there was no point in driving up my insurance premiums. Which was true, though what I didn’t mention was an odd, queasy sense that left me feeling tired, off-balance and weirdly hollow, like a bad hangover. It didn’t take a genius to guess that it had something to do with the soul-sapping number that Attenborough had done on me, nor did it take a genius to guess that a hospital visit wouldn’t help; an evil wizard trying to suck the life out of me wasn’t exactly something that a doctor was equipped to deal with. 

I did consent to let him hang around my apartment a while longer, which he insisted on doing, making sure that I didn’t die in my sleep, even though I could tell he would rather have gone home to his own bed. Whatever small reserve of energy I’d accumulated while sleeping on the boat had been depleted by the morning’s exertions, and by the time we finally got home I was dead on my feet. I remember stumbling across the living room, where Mister showed his affection by making a spirited effort to trip me, and seeing some of Bob’s porn mags strewn carelessly across the coffee table. Light bedtime reading for Thomas, apparently, and I was at a stage of bizarre lucidity where it made perfect sense.  _Like people who read cookbooks,_ I thought sagely, right before falling into bed and passing out.

I slept for nearly twenty hours straight and when I woke it was to the fading traces of a dream that felt like a memory, though it was no memory of mine—a dream about secrets, and a friend’s spiraling madness, and a child’s bones buried on the island’s lonely shore.

_ Great, _ I thought, blinking away hallucinations in the cavernous darkness of my bedroom, scrubbing my hands over my face, my skin still cold and prickling with sweat. Apparently it wasn’t enough for me to be haunted by my own guilty conscience; I seemed to have inherited the island’s memories as well. Some people have all the luck, right?

I changed out of my sweat-soaked shirt and ventured out into the living room, but it was as empty and quiet as a house with two animals of that size gets. I saw that Thomas had made a half-assed effort to clean up and found a note on the coffee table saying that he’d had to go to work, that he’d checked in on me and I seemed to be doing fine so he’d decided to let me sleep myself out. 

He also dropped the not-so-subtle hint that if I did wake up and happen to find myself with some free time, he’d really appreciate it if I could get my ass to the police office and clear up this whole “dead” thing so he could go home.

Going to the police station would mean seeing  Murphy—and considering that we hadn’t parted on the best of terms, I owed her a heads up, one which would probably take the form of a very uncomfortable phone call. Delaying wasn’t going to make it any easier, as Ebenezar was fond of telling me, but I decided that it could wait until after coffee.

I set some water boiling for coffee, fried up an egg, and generally exhausted the culinary capabilities of my kitchen before I gave in and dialed her work number, only to be told that she’d pulled the late shift last night and wasn’t due in until after lunch. After a minute’s consideration, I got up and got dressed, then drove over to her house, making a brief stop along the way.

“Dresden,” she said flatly when she opened the door and her eyes fell on me. I knew I hadn’t woken her up because I could hear the TV going behind her, but she was still wearing her pajamas and looking at me as if I ranked pretty low on the list of people she’d wanted to find on her doorstep. “What’s on fire this time?”

“Nothing’s on fire,” I assured her. “No emergency. I just wanted to explain what happened, and let you know that it’s over and we won.”

“That’s all?”

I drew in a breath. “I also, uhm... wanted to apologize. And maybe grovel a little.” I held up the box, spoils of my earlier stop off, and brandished it hopefully. “I brought you chocolate?” 

The corner of her mouth quirked, and in that moment, a tension that I hadn’t even realized I was carrying eased. She might make me sweat and plead and jump through hoops, but she would forgive me eventually. I hadn’t screwed things up beyond repair, not this time, not yet anyway. 

“Well, it’s a start,” she allowed, opening the door wider and stepping aside for me to enter. “Come on in then.”

We settled in at her dining room table and over coffee I recapped the past few days’ events. I didn’t name any names, just told her that there had been a wizard trying for a coup and to set the stage he’d been causing a lot of chaos—how he’d been responsible for the suicides on the beach, how he’d been manipulating Marcone, and how the business with the golem had been Marcone’s way of getting out. 

Murphy listened without interruption, eating chocolate in lieu of breakfast and making her businesslike “mm-hm” noises. 

I finished by saying that I didn’t know if the police had come across any other odd incidents recently—and Murphy didn’t jump to enlighten me—but if so, they’d probably seen the end of them for a while. 

“So this guy is definitely dead?” she asked after I’d finished. “Not just ‘mostly’ dead or ‘probably’ dead?”

“Yeah. I saw it happen.”

“Saw it. I’m sure you did.” Her tone made it clear she thought I’d done more than that, but knew better than to ask. 

“Them’s the facts, ma’am—he lost control of the demons he’d summoned and they turned on him. I didn’t have to do a thing.”

“A karmic ending worthy of a Disney movie,” she said dryly, but she didn’t push the issue. Taking a sip of her coffee, she asked, “So does the groveling commence now?”

I scratched the back of my head ruefully. “Might as well. Alright, so—I was an idiot. Again. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you that Marcone was alive and I was hanging out with him. I should have trusted you with that information, but I didn’t, and you have every right to get mad at me for that.” 

She set her cup down abruptly, the ceramic clunking hard against the tabletop, though her face looked more frustrated than angry. 

“Harry,” she said. “Far be it from me to head off your little self-recrimination train—but do you actually understand why I was angry, or are you just apologizing to get me off your back?”

When I couldn’t answer that right away, she pressed her advantage, leaning forward. “You can’t claim it just slipped your mind. You had the chance to tell me, and you didn’t. So explain to me what was going on in your head, why you decided not to.” 

I’d been expecting her to lay the guilt on heavy, and while it was a relief that she hadn’t, the question she was putting to me now was equally difficult in its own way. 

“I was doing what I thought would keep both of you safe,” I admitted at last. “Marcone was better off being assumed dead, and if you’d known anything about his whereabouts, it could have put you in danger too.”

“Dresden, I’m a _cop_ ,” she began, exasperated. “I deal with danger every day, and if you think that I’m not capab—”

“Murphy, this isn’t about being weak or being strong!” I burst out, fighting the urge to pull my hair out. “Stars, I _know_ you’re no pushover. After the number of times you’ve saved my sorry ass, believe me, _I know_. But these weren’t guys that you could have taken down with guns, or aikido, or even a heaping helping of good, old-fashioned Murphy stubbornness. They would have ransacked your head for whatever information they wanted and then killed you, and there’s no way for you to defend yourself against an enemy like that!”

I broke off when I realized that this probably wasn’t the best way to apologize. But this wasn’t just chivalry, or chauvinism, or whatever you wanted to call it—I would have been telling the same thing to any other plain vanilla human in her position. And I knew just how galling this was for her, to be told that there was nothing she could do about her helplessness but swallow it; it was so antithetical to everything she was as a person and as an officer of the law, but it was only the truth. 

She watched me with pursed lips for a long, tense moment, then asked, “Weren’t you supposed to be groveling?” 

“Ah, crap.” I sighed “I’m no good at this.”

“Maybe you should practice more,” she suggested dryly, but when she leaned back, lacing her fingers behind her head, her face was resigned. Only so many times you can retread the same ground, I guess. “Besides, as much as I complain, I’d rather have you shooting straight with me than telling me what you think I want to hear.”

“I’m sorry, Murph,” I said again.

“I know. And I’m sure you’ll be sorry next time too.”

_Ouch_. Especially because she was probably right. 

Seeing the look on my face, she set her cup aside and laid her hand over mine. “Harry, look,” she said gently. “I know that trusting people isn’t your first instinct. But you’ve got to learn how to do it sometime.” 

“I’ll try.” That was the most I could promise. “As long as you’ll be there to give me a kick in the pants when I screw up.”

“What else are friends for?” Murphy asked rhetorically. She inclined her mug toward me and I met her silent toast.

“Alright,” she went on after taking another drink. “So where’s Marcone now, if you got all this evil wizard business squared away?”

“Beats me,” I said with a shrug. Then, seeing her eyebrow start to climb, I added quickly, “No really, God’s honest truth—we dropped him off downtown yesterday morning, and that’s the last I saw of him.”

She tsked, looking amused. “For shame, Dresden, aiding and abetting a murder suspect. I should have you booked for collusion.” 

“I should let you. Nothing would clear his name faster, I’m sure.”

“Aha, and now we get to the real reason why you showed up on my doorstep.”

I spread my hands. “Guilty as charged. Thomas is about to kill me for real if I don’t get this straightened out so he can go home. Do you mind if I tag along when you go in to work later?” 

She shook her head, chuckling. “Man, you don’t do anything by halves, do you? Chief’s gonna have kittens when our stiff strolls in the front door. Cornick—that’s the guy on Marcone’s case—he’s going to be screaming conspiracy and trying to say that this was some stunt of mine.” 

“I can leave you out of it, if you’d rather.”

“What, and miss out on this prime time entertainment? Not on your life.” She downed the last of her coffee and got up to put her mug in the sink. “Give me a few minutes to get my cop on; you can buy me breakfast and then we’ll head over to the station.”

That could have gone worse. 

 

However, it wasn’t until after we’d eaten and were driving to the station that it occurred to me I had another secret I should probably get off my chest. 

“Sooo,” I began, too casually, feeling Murphy’s attention perk up immediately. “In the interests of keeping this newfound resolution of full disclosure, etc... you should probably know that I’m, uh... sleeping with Marcone.”

We were lucky that the car happened to be stopped at a red light when I dropped that particular bombshell, and even then the car gave a hiccupping lurch forward as Murphy’s foot momentarily came off the brake and she had to slam it down again. 

“What?” she said, her head coming round to stare at me in disbelief. “I— _what_?”

“You heard me,” I muttered, feeling myself turning beet red.

“I did, but you’ll have to forgive me for having trouble processing that. I—you’re joking,” she said flatly, then took in the look on my face and dismissed the idea just as quickly. “Okay you’re not. Just—seriously, _what_? Did you _trip_? Did he?” 

“Oh hey look, the light’s green,” I pointed out desperately, just as the irritated blare of a horn from the car behind us brought her attention back to traffic. Blinking back to the present, she moved her foot to the gas distractedly.

“Harry,” she began slowly. “I didn’t know that you even liked men, much less that you liked _him_. Enough to—Christ.” She squeezed her eyes shut for a brief second, like she was expecting the world to make sense when she opened them again, or like she was trying to purge a particularly distressing mental image. “I guess my question is... why now?”

_Why now_ might have been the icing, but  _why him_ was the cake. Good questions—and it’d be nice if someone could answer them for me, because I sure as heck couldn’t offer much, much less anything that Murphy would accept.

“I think,” I said carefully, keeping my attention fixed on the road, “that if we’d met under different circumstances”—if we’d been different people, with different lives—“this would have happened years ago.”

In the corner of my eye I saw Murphy steal another glance at me, but she didn’t interrupt. 

“It’s not as sudden as it seems,” I continued. “I’ve always liked him, even when I didn’t want to. Even when I don’t like what he _does_ , as a person he’s always been...”

“Likeable,” Murphy supplied dryly when I found myself groping for a word, saving me the embarrassment of having to repeat myself like an ineloquent teenager. When I didn’t reply, she added, “Yes, I have met the man, Harry. He’s a suave, charismatic, well-spoken scumbag. And you know that as well as I do—so what gives?”

I felt my jaw tighten. “So maybe I decided that it’s no one’s business but mine who I want to date.” 

“Easy there, tiger, I’m not trying to put your back up,” she said, keeping her tone mild. “I’m just calling it like I see it.”

That defused my anger, and I sighed. “I know. And I know you’re going to think I’ve been... compromised or something, but trust me, I don’t like his business any more than I ever have. I don’t plan on helping him with it or even getting involved, but the fact is, it’s been a long time since he was a black-and-white bad guy, and he’s been on our team more often than not.” 

“No, he’s been on _your_ team,” she corrected me. “I get that the lines have blurred for you, but in the world I live in, I’m still a cop and he’s still a criminal.”

Fair enough. But while Murphy was still my cop, somewhere along the line he’d become  my criminal. Hell’s bells.

We pulled into the station parking lot. Murphy was silent for a while, scanning the rows for an empty space, before she said, “You realize this is going to change some things, right?” 

I steeled myself. “What do you mean?” 

“Well, for one, you’re never going to work for S.I. again,” she said, not cruelly, but not beating around any bushes either. “That’s not a threat, it’s just a fact. Even if you break up with him in the end, we already get enough shit for putting a wizard on accounts—there’s no way I’m going to risk the fallout of having a _mob-affiliated_ wizard on the payroll. I’m sorry, Harry.”

I winced, but I could see where she was coming from. “I understand,” I said. “S.I. hasn’t had that much work for me lately anyway.” 

She sighed. “I know. I wish I could use you more, but it’s never my call.” 

“I’ll still help you out if you need it, of course. Just, off-the-record-like.”

“You’re a stand-up guy, Harry,” she said, pulling into a space and putting the car in park. “Sometimes. Usually.” I caught her smiling though.

“I do my best,” I said. “So, we ready to do this?”

“Yeah,” she said, but stopped before turning off the car, her hand on the ignition and her eyes troubled where they rested on the steering wheel. “Harry, listen. I’m not going to try to convince you that dating Marcone is a bad idea, even though I think it is, or tell you that you ought to watch yourself around him—because frankly, if you haven’t figured that out by now then you never will. But I want you to promise that you’ll remember something.”

“What?” I asked, hearing the defensive edge in my voice.

“That there’s a reason why you weren’t friends with him before.” She looked up and watched me while that sank in. “I don’t know what he did or said to change your mind—and I don’t need to know, that’s your business. But I want you to remember that there was a time, not so long ago, when you hated him and everything he stood for, and I want you to think long and hard about whether anything’s really changed.”

“You really think I haven’t been asking myself that?”

“Harry,” she said patiently. “I think that your synapses are so fried from the first sex you’ve had in what—three years? Four?—that you’re not thinking all that straight right now.”

I wasn’t even sure I could argue with that, and she didn’t give me the chance to before she was shutting off the car and unlocking her door. 

“In any case—you’re an adult, and who you choose to be with is your decision. Just keep in mind, Harry, that if you’re on Marcone’s side, then I won’t always be on yours.”

 

Our entrance made quite the splash. Murphy had called ahead and left a message for homicide guy Cornick, telling him that she was coming in with a lead on the Dresden case, so he was hanging out right there at the front desk when we came in. I don’t know what he’d been expecting, but it sure as hell wasn’t me, because the look on his face was _priceless_ when I ambled in on Murphy’s heels.

Rawlins was there too, buying a coke from the machine in the lobby. He noticed Murphy first, but when his eyes fell on me he stopped in his tracks, blank shock all over his face. It was replaced a moment later with a thoughtful expression as he attempted to bite back a smile. “Well, gosh-darn,” he drawled, popping the lid on his coke and taking a lazy swig. “Here I thought we’d finally gotten rid of you.” 

Cornick found his tongue and immediately declared all of this to be some sort of hoax (which Rawlins was obviously party to, judging from his lack of surprise) and demanded that Murphy stop playing with his toys—I mean, interfering with his investigation. He wanted me handcuffed. He wanted me arrested, though on what grounds, he wasn’t exactly clear. 

The ruckus attracted at least half a dozen other officers and staff, poking their heads in to see what all the hoopla was, and it had all the makings of a circus before the exasperated chief of police arrived to take things in hand. He took one look at me and wisely issued a summary dismissal to the gawkers. Apparently there wasn’t any police procedure to fall back on when the alleged murder victim wanders in off the street, go figure, but the chief declined to handcuff me, and didn’t let Cornick send Murphy away. (“Everyone knows she’s his handler, let her be,” were his words, jerking a thumb at me as if I were some kind of zoo animal. _Homo magicus._ Please do not feed the wizard.) 

They did stick me in an interrogation room, though they left the door open as a concession to the fact that I wasn’t actually a prisoner, while several officers rotated through with questions that they couldn’t seem to believe they were asking. 

For the first hour or so I was only peripherally aware of what was going on, since no one was making an effort to keep me in the loop. I know they called the morgue to verify that the body was still on ice, then somebody came in and snapped a picture of me to email over for comparison. They wanted a bajillion forms of ID, then fingerprints, retinal scans, dental records, the works. They wanted to know where I’d been on the night of the murder, if I was aware that Marcone had been arrested for it; then one person would leave and someone else would come in and ask mostly the same questions again. 

I told them the truth up to the point where Marcone dropped me off at home after the date—though I noticed everyone was scrupulously avoiding that particular word—but then played dumb for the rest of it. I told them that Marcone had been framed—which was sort of true, even if he’d done it himself—and that if they let me see the body, I could prove it. Which, again, wasn’t a request they had a procedure for, and provoked a fresh round of dithering each time I asked. 

Murphy brought me coffee in a lull between interrogations, leaning in the doorway as she drank hers and looking altogether too amused by the uproar around her. 

“So are you supposed to be the good cop, huh, little lady?” I asked in my best tough-guy growl.

She gave me a wolfish smile. “I’m the not-on-this-case cop, or my blood pressure would be a hell of a lot higher right now.” She shook her head, still grinning. “Oh man, I’ve never seen that ass Cornick with so much egg on his face. You keep this up and I might be buying _you_ chocolate.” 

And then it was back to the questions again. One thing that I noticed over the course of the afternoon was the number of officers from SI who found an excuse to wander through and exchange a bit of meaningless conversation with me, and how they didn’t ask the questions that everyone else was, just came by to see if the rumors were true. 

They were all thinking it, but only one put words to it—a younger man that I’d seen around a time or two. “So, the body they found,” he said, all cool and casual where he leaned in the door. “More of your voodoo stuff?” 

“Not mine, but yeah—voodoo.”

“Goddamned magic,” he muttered, shaking his head and wandering out again. That magic was real was the great unspoken truth that everyone in SI came to understand sooner or later, but it took a certain bravado to admit it. It was frustrating, even though I understood why—when magic always got proven to be a hoax, who wanted to be the sucker that had admitted to believing in it, right?

It took forever and a day, but eventually they agreed to let me see the body and arranged for a squad car to take me over to the forensic center. 

We were met by the head pathologist, a middle-aged woman who was introduced as Dr. Foster, tall and bony with red hair and skin that was vampire-pale under the fluorescent lights. She looked unimpressed with my miraculous revival, as if she’d already written me off as a fraud and resented being dragged from her work to deal with this monkey business. 

Down at the slabs, Dr. Foster had already pulled the body for viewing. It wasn’t looking so hot, and from a wide, T-shaped incision on the chest I gathered that they’d already done the internal autopsy. It made my stomach give an unpleasant lurch, and I wasn’t the only one in the room looking sort of queasy. 

“Alright,” I said, helping myself to a pair of rubber gloves while Dr. Foster glared disapprovingly. “So, ladies and gentlemen, for my next trick, I am going to reveal to you that this body is not a body at all.”

“If you read my autopsy report, I think you’ll find that it is,” Dr. Foster snapped, folding her arms impatiently. Tough crowd. It was people like her that made me glad I didn’t do birthday parties.

Wearing the pilfered gloves, I carefully turned the corpse’s head so that I could examine the back of the scalp for the hair that anchored the illusion. Rigor mortis had come and gone, so I didn’t have to force it, but it was still unnerving to be touching my own dead body. I didn’t want to get close to it, but had to swallow my reluctance and bend over close enough to peer at the hairline. 

“What are you looking for?” Dr. Foster demanded. “There was no head trauma, the victim died on a bed.”

“Not looking for trauma,” I muttered—found it. Marking the spot with my finger, I looked up. “Can I get some tweezers? Perhaps a magnifying glass?”

Someone in a lab coat produced both. 

“Alright,” I said. “Next, I would like a volunteer from the audience? Anyone? Dr. Foster?”

She’d apparently decided that the fastest way to get me gone was to humor me, because she stepped up but didn’t lose her sour expression. “What do you want?” she asked flatly. 

“You see that hair, right there?”

She lowered her glasses to the tip of her nose to peer over the rims. “I see lots of hair.” 

“No, right here.” The tweezers were very sharp and I could point it out with precision. “There’s one strand that’s not growing out of the scalp, it’s been stitched into it. Do you see it?”

Her brows clamped into a frown when she saw it, because there was no explanation for why a hair was doing that. I handed her the tweezers and the magnifying glass and stepped back. 

“I want you to pull it out,” I said.

She shot me a deeply mistrustful look, but took my place beside the body and lifted the magnifying glass to find it again. 

One of the officers, on my suggestion, had brought a camcorder. I doubted it would survive the encounter, but figured it couldn’t hurt to try, except in the sense that it was my tax dollars at work. I looked at him now. “Is that rolling?” 

“Yup.”

“Alright, Dr. Foster, whenever you’re ready.”

She huffed an annoyed sigh, shaking her head as if she planned to have strong words with whoever had been dumb enough to let me through the doors, and bent down to squint at the corpse. With steady hands, she set the tweezers in place and made a sharp tug. 

It all happened at once. The corpse jerked, giving a sudden, full-body spasm and Dr. Foster, cool as a cucumber until confronted with that, let a small shriek and leapt back, the magnifying glass going skittering across the floor. The illusion sloughed off the golem like sand and the whole thing seemed to darken and wither right before our eyes, brittle limbs curling in on themselves like an insect in its death throes before it shuddered into stillness. 

It was over in seconds, and where my doppelganger had been there now lay a... thing. It was vaguely human-shaped, but the trunk of its body was made of dried, cracking mud and its curling limbs were made of sticks. A stained square of linen with Sanskrit lettering was pinned to the chest. The head was made of leather, drawn tight over some kind of frame, with two jagged holes punched in it to suggest eyes and a mouth that was stitched shut. That, I recalled distantly, was an eastern practice to ensure that no bodiless spirits took up residence in the golem. 

Granted, I was the only one (with the possible exception of Murphy) who had the presence of mind to note the finer points of Veda’s golem-crafting. Everyone else was busy with variations on a theme of “what the hell?!” 

In the end, no one was willing to put the golem in their report. There’s human nature for you—twenty people see the impossible happen right in front of their eyes, and not a one of them wants to be the first one to admit it. Still, it’d give them something to think about the next time the unexplainable threw itself on SI’s doorstep. 

 

But that’s getting ahead of myself. I wasn’t around for much of the fallout from that, because after the police finished with me, I had to go deal with the  _ other _ fallout—that is, someone still had  to break the news about Attenborough’s untimely demise to the White Council, and since I was the only wizard in our merry band of adventurers, that job fell to me. Seriously, this is the thanks I get? They should have been pinning a freaking medal on me, but knowing the White Council, I was more likely to get an Inquisition.

I ended up driving out to visit Ebenezar first, to see if maybe I couldn’t get him on my side before all hell broke loose. His farm is a good six hours away, but that was fine by me—I had a lot on my mind, and I didn’t object to a nice, quiet drive to think things over. 

Or it was nice, until the Beetle broke down on Highway 34, leaving me stranded approximately a million miles from anywhere. Other drivers showed a remarkable reluctance to pick up a scruffy, trenchcoat-clad hitchhiker, imagine that, and I was starting to wonder if I’d be walking to Missouri when a blessedly friendly truck driver offered me a lift. 

We arrived near sundown. Ebenezar was standing at the end of his drive, arms folded over his chest like a dad waiting in ambush for a teenager sneaking in after curfew. I didn’t even ask how he’d known I was coming. 

“Word is, you’ve been kicking up a ruckus, is that right?” he asked as the truck roared off into the setting sun. Never much of one for pleasantries, Ebenezar.

“No keeping anything from you,” I sighed, hitching my bag higher on my shoulder. “What have you heard?”

“How ’bout you tell me what you done, boy, and we’ll see if they square up.”

He led me inside, where the table in his rustic kitchen was set for two and a pot was keeping warm on his wood-burning stove. He sat me down without a word and gave me a plate, and so over a simple, hearty dinner I told him the whole story. 

It took the better part of an hour, because I kept forgetting parts—like my first meeting with Tabby, and then the M.A.G.I.C. people—and having to backtrack, but he listened without interrupting, his weathered face unreadable. 

And yeah, I told him about Marcone. About me and Marcone. It didn’t have anything to do with what I had to testify to the White Council, but, well… I figured that he ought to know. That he deserved to know—as family, or the closest thing I had to it. Also, it wouldn’t have been fair if _I_ got to escape the excruciating awkwardness that is coming out to your parent-figures, now would it? Apparently I’m a masochist. 

I admit, I was a little worried about how he would take the news of my somewhat-less-than-rigidly-straight sexuality. He was usually a pretty live-and-let-live guy, but he’d also been born in a very different century, and sex is one of those subjects that otherwise rational people can fall apart on sometimes. Was he going to react badly? If so, _how_ badly, and what was I going to do about it? I’d never had the opportunity or inclination to sound out his opinion on the topic before, so I had no way to guess. 

Not to mention that this wasn’t just some random cabana boy I’d picked up, it was _Baron_ _John Marcone._ Even if Ebenezar didn’t object to me dating dudes, he couldn’t possibly be thrilled by that one in particular. 

Though as it turned out, I needn’t have worried. “Hoss, you ain’t got a patch on my younger days,” he snorted. 

And seeing as I _really didn’t want to know_ , we both left it at that. 

When I’d finished and fallen silent, Ebenezar at last folded his arm and leaned back in his chair, his expression distant. “So, Attenborough, huh? I must admit, I never would have expected it from him.” 

“Do you believe me?” I ventured.

“Oh yes, I believe you. Not least ’cause you know I’d tan your hide if you lied to me.”

Thirty-seven years old, and I didn’t doubt him for a second. 

“So what are we going to do next?” I asked.

“Well, _you’re_ gonna go patch up some holes in the back fence that I been saving for you,” he said, pushing himself to his feet and gathering up the dishes. “ _I’m_ going to go have a chat with our good friend the Merlin. You just leave this to me, boy.”

I stayed the night on his farm, though Ebenezar was elsewhere for most of it. The next morning he packed me off on a bus to Chicago, promising that he would handle the White Council, but getting a tow truck for the Beetle was on me. 

I’d been expecting to find myself on trial again—I mean, it was one dead, highly respected older wizard versus a bunch of slander being spouted by my punk self—but Ebenezar was as good as his word. With him going to bat for me, I was scarcely involved in the White Council’s investigation at all, and when I finally did get called in it was as a witness—for the prosecution. The _prosecution._ Will wonders never cease. 

Sure, the usual suspects made the usual round of insinuations during my testimony, but somewhere along the line that had lost the power to aggravate me. I just sat it out, mostly bored, while they sniped about my dangerously lax morality, suspicious history, manifestly psychotic tendencies, sub-par grooming habits, juvenile sense of humor, and so on and so forth. 

The evidence backed me up though, as did the testimony that Marcone and Jonathan provided. They both represented signatories of the Accords whose rights Attenborough had violated, and the White Council may not have been Marcone’s biggest fans, but they could recognize a major player when they saw one—when he took the stand, they didn’t give him half the grief they gave me. 

It was surreal seeing Marcone in Edinburgh—like someone with a really bizarre sense of humor had spliced frames from _The Godfather_ into a _Lord of the Rings_ movie. He wore the voluminous robes traditionally provided for witnesses (wore them  well, improbably enough) and seemed perfectly at home with everything; Jonathan just looked green around the gills. 

Luccio was there too. Ebenezar had put out orders for her to be taken into custody, her and the other wardens who had tried to arrest me, but apparently she’d beaten him to the punch—immediately after Attenborough’s death, before the wardens even came looking for her, she’d turned herself in. It emerged in short order that she and a dozen others, mostly younger wizards, had been mind-controlled. None of them were being prosecuted, since they hadn’t been collaborating with Attenborough willingly, absolving them of his guilt, and now that he was dead the spell was broken. 

Or so the theory went. 

For my part, I listened to their testimony and couldn’t help remembering Attenborough’s final words. _How much better it would serve my purposes to lie_. Listened as they answered every question in the negative—no, Attenborough was the only one. No one else had helped. No one else had known. No, no, no. 

_I worked alone._

How easy would it be for someone to dictate their answers even now? Their minds had been compromised, their defenses knocked down and the foundation laid for someone else’s will to take up residence. That didn’t just disappear because the original puppet-master was dead, and I couldn’t possibly have been the only one in the room thinking it. 

In the end, no one was surprised—least of all me—when after an expeditious trial the Council concluded that Attenborough was guilty of breaking both the Accords and the Laws of Magic, and moreover, that he alone was guilty. No co-conspirators. Case closed, game over, go home, don’t look behind the curtain. 

_I worked alone._

Sure you did, I thought bitterly as I fell into step with the mass of people shuffling out of the hall. 

Marcone and I hadn’t been allowed to speak before the trial—standard operating procedure, as they didn’t want us to discuss the case and possibly influence each other’s testimony—but then we didn’t get a chance to talk afterwards either. I caught a glimpse of him briefly, but he was deep in conversation with the Merlin and I decided it could wait. When Marcone wound up ditching the after-party to go deal with “pressing business” in Chicago, I wondered if he was avoiding me on purpose. 

And he wasn’t the only one. You’d think that after heading off a supernatural battle royale on the scale that Attenborough had been orchestrating, people could find something to be happy about, but in the wake of the trial the mood around Edinburgh was grim and subdued. I remarked to Ebenezar that they probably would have been happier to pin it on me. 

“I don’t deny that,” he allowed after a long moment’s consideration. “But not for the reasons you think. Attenborough was a fair man and a principled one, and just about the last person anybody would have pegged for a move like this. No one’s saying you didn’t do right in stopping him, but it ain’t much to celebrate. The way these folks see it, if a man like Attenborough could go rotten, who _can_ you trust?”

Maybe. Though it wouldn’t have killed them to say thanks. I decided to leave before I overstayed my welcome, or before one of Attenborough’s old drinking buddies decided to punch me in the face. 

I came across Jonathan outside the gates, apparently forgotten. He was back in his regular clothes now—presumably his regular clothes, though I was no fashion palate and even I could tell that the flannel was ill-advised—bumming around on the steps and smoking a cigarette. Maybe they expected him to buy his own plane ticket home; gods knew the wardens didn’t like his kind much more than they liked me. 

“I didn’t know you smoked,” I remarked.

Jonathan gave me a look, like what I’d said was almost funny “When the occasion warrants it,” he replied mildly. He held out the pack in an implicit offer. 

I waved it aside. “No thanks. If I smoked when the occasion warranted it, I’d never stop.” 

He didn’t reply to that, and an awkward silence rushed in to fill the space. I still wasn’t at ease with Jonathan, since I got a suckerpunch of guilt every time I looked at him—he was the walking, talking reminder of a moral failure that would stick with me for a long time to come. 

“Listen...” I broke out at last, just as Jonathan started to say, “About your...”

I stopped. “You first.” 

“About your fee.” Jonathan pointedly flicked his spent cigarette butt onto the middle of the Council steps and lit another. “I know Tabby’s the one who contracted you, but send the bill to my office and I’ll take care of it.”

“You really don’t have to pay me,” I protested uncomfortably. Even though I had rent, and utilities, and car insurance coming due, and I hadn’t been making any other money recently... I could kick myself for being so noble sometimes. “Look, if anything, I should be apologizing to you. I wanted to say again that I’m really sorry for the way we treated you. We thought you were working for the bad guys, but… that shouldn’t have made a difference. We still shouldn’t have done it, and I’m sorry.”

He shrugged, as if the subject were a dreary one that he not-so-subtly wished I would stop bringing up. “It doesn’t matter,” he said carelessly. “And I insist that you get paid for your time. You can count any time you spent investigating Attenborough as billable hours. Money isn’t an object.” 

And, well... it was for me. Practicality triumphed, clubbing shame into submission, and I gave in as gracefully as I could. 

“Thanks, I appreciate it,” I said. Though no way was I going to charge him in full.

“Oh and also...” Jonathan said, his voice offhand. “Tabby would like you to drop by the house if you get the chance, to make sure all the wards have been disabled. There shouldn’t be any danger now that Attenborough’s gone, but—still. Better safe than sorry.”

“You know I don’t mind racking up more billable hours,” I said. “But can’t you do that yourself? You’re the one who built them in the first place.”

Jonathan glanced away. “No,” he replied, his voice quiet and tight. “I’m not welcome there anymore.” 

“What? You—” 

“She threw me out.”

I blinked, taken aback. “I’m sorry. I had no idea.” 

“I finally told her the truth,” he continued without prompting, speaking quickly now as his voice started to shake, still not looking at me. “I told her _everything_ —”

Oh dear. 

“And she said she didn’t know me, and told me to get out.” He fell abruptly silent, as though his mind had only just caught up with his mouth. He took a medicinal drag off his cigarette to steady his ragged breathing.

“I’m sorry,” I said quietly. Inadequate, but all that anyone ever can say.

“God, I’m such an idiot,” he breathed out in a sigh, closing his eyes. “Just like the rest of my family. We always want to think of our parents as wiser than we are, you know? But mine were both so foolish.”

I nodded cautiously; I could relate, since my mother had apparently been many things, but no one had ever accused her of being wise. 

I was more than a little uncomfortable at being thrust into the role of confidant, since Jonathan was essentially a stranger. But just as it crossed my mind to wonder why he wasn’t telling this to someone else, the question answered itself—there was no one else. 

He’d been living as a human so thoroughly and for so long that there was almost no one in his life who knew about the White Court. And he couldn’t confide this to his kin, since vampires have little understanding of love and even less use for it. 

“My father was human. An artist.” The words tumbled out of him in an uncertain torrent, the confession that he couldn’t make to anyone else. “He fell for my mother because... well, she was the masterpiece he’d always wanted his name on. Or that’s what Isaiah told me, anyway. I never knew my father well—there wasn’t much left of him by the time I was old enough to know the difference. My mother fed on him for over a decade, until one day she looked up and realized what she’d done, and decided much too late that she was actually in love with him.”

Jonathan snorted softly, recrimination in his bitter smile. “And that’s the sort of creature I am. It’s in my blood. Tabetha deserved to know that before she chose me, but I was too afraid to tell her. I was afraid I’d lose her.” 

“You’ll work it out somehow,” I said. I wanted to believe that saying so could make it true. “You _love_ her, and she loves you. It can’t just end like this.”

Because call me a hopeless romantic, but I  believe in true love and I’d had too much heartbreak in my own life to wish it on anyone else. I couldn’t imagine that they had beaten the odds, escaped the White Court curse on love and happiness, only to have their relationship break the same way as any other—on a lie. 

“I hope you’re right,” Jonathan allowed without optimism.

With nothing left to say that would do any good, I clapped him on the shoulder. “Come on,” I said bracingly. “I’ll give you a lift back to Chicago.” 

 

The Borlais stuck around for the trial, ostensibly providing moral support for their traumatized grandson, but eventually they ran out of excuses to linger. Lara strong-armed me into going to the airport to see them off—possibly to serve as extra muscle in case they showed any reluctance to go. I would have been happy never to see them again and I was pretty sure that the feeling was mutual, but etiquette, go figure. I never did find out what deal Lara ended up cutting with them, but there didn’t seem to be any hard (hah) feelings between them. 

Everyone had been looking a little worse for the wear last time I’d seen them, but now they were scrubbed clean, well-rested and well-fed (which I didn’t want to dwell on), back to their usual immaculate standards. 

Lara and Carolinus drifted apart from the group to give each other smoldering looks out of earshort, while Catelyn wandered over to make light conversation with me. She didn’t come straight out and say it, but after a while I got the idea that she was talking her way around to a grudging apology. Maybe she was wary of my power, or wary of the influence I might have on Lara, or maybe an apology was just the done thing after a feeding faux pas, but apparently she was reluctant to burn her Chicago bridges entirely. I decided that Marcone had made his point loud and clear, she’d gotten her whack on the nose for it, and I could afford to be magnanimous. 

“Hey, what’s a little soul-sucking between friends?” I asked with false joviality. “Besides, I don’t mind having the head of the Borlais clan owing me a favor.”

Catelyn’s smile froze, just briefly enough that if I hadn’t been watching for it I wouldn’t have noticed. But there it was. 

See, I’d had a hunch, ever since I’d watched her use her wiles to take down Attenborough’s shield. I don’t care what people say about men thinking only with their dicks (I’ll even be generous and admit that it happens on occasion)—she _shouldn’t_ have been able to do that. It doesn’t matter how hot a woman is—no man is willing to throw himself on a grenade for a pretty face he just met. Just, no. Not unless there’s a lot of  heavy duty magic working to back up that compulsion. Meanwhile, Catelyn had not only svengali’d sixteen people at once, she had done it to sixteen _wizards_ , whose mental defenses should have been up to the challenge of resisting that.

“Beg pardon?” she asked, innocent incomprehension.

“Carolinus isn’t the real head of the Borlais clan, is he?” I said, not even really a question. “It’s you. He’s the one standing out front, soaking up the limelight and catching the potshots, but you’re the one pulling the strings.”

Maybe I should have seen it sooner. It is the White Court’s standard M.O., after all—pride isn’t their sin, and they’re perfectly happy to let themselves be underestimated if it keeps them out of the line of fire. 

Catelyn’s gaze had sharpened speculatively, and she pressed one perfectly manicured talon against her scarlet lips. “Now Harry, what could possibly have put that notion in your head?” she murmured in a throaty purr. Maybe she wasn’t trying, or maybe I was building up a tolerance, but it wasn’t doing anything for me and that was a relief. 

“Carolinus doesn’t have the juice for what you pulled on the island. Holding that many wizards in thrall? Don’t even pretend like it’s a trick that anyone could do.”

Her sleek smile didn’t confirm or deny, but I knew I was right. “What a _male_ thing to believe,” she said, just shy of a scoff. “Blaming the woman for your weakness, mistaking the potency of your own lust for sorcery.”

I just shook my head. “You can sing that tune till the cows come home. But I know who to keep my eye on if the two of you come back to Chicago, and I’ll make sure Ramirez does too. He is the regional commander in your area, right? Though if you behave yourself, we might keep it between the two of us.” 

Her mask slipped again and for a moment the glower she gave me was outright venomous, but Carolinus and Lara rejoined us then, averting whatever response she might have made. Instead she resumed her placid former expression and transferred herself to her husband’s arm, arranging herself there like an ornament and settling her head faux-adoringly on his shoulder. He automatically shifted to accommodate her, both of their movements so long-practiced as to have become second nature. They made the very picture of a loving couple, but love played no part in their courtship, only the reptilian chemistry with which snakes choose their mates. I wondered if he was her willing accomplice, or if, like Lara and Lord Raith, every word he spoke was only a vehicle for her thoughts. 

“It was a pleasure to make your acquaintance, wizard,” Carolinus said, with polished sincerity that was far too perfect to have been genuine. “And a shame that I didn’t get the opportunity to speak with your lover. He seemed like a most... resourceful man.”

“And you are so _lucky_ that he _adores_ you the way he does,” Caitlin cooed, her voice saccharine though the glint in her eye was razored. “You simply _must_ give him our regards.”

That caught Lara’s interest and I could feel as she perked up. “Lover?” she inquired, as though being presented with a tantalizing piece of gossip. “Why Harry, my dear, have you been holding out on us?” 

“Oh, you didn’t know?” Catelyn asked, all innocent surprise. “He’s found himself a _lovely_ older gentleman. John Marcone, I believe the man’s name was? He absolutely _dotes_ on Harry.”

Right, and there went any doubt that this little performance hadn’t been staged entirely for Lara’s benefit. White Court vampires aren’t graceful losers, and outing me to the Raith was just one petty jab before they left, subtle revenge for Catelyn’s humiliation over the kiss. 

Lara’s perfectly arched eyebrows rose. “Well, well.” Her eyes gleamed as she recalculated the degrees of separation between kingpin Marcone and la familia del Raith—and found them to her liking. “Now that is quite the catch. My felicitations, Harry.” 

 

Finally, I drove over to Tabby’s house in Logan Square to see about cleaning up the last of Jonathan’s land mines. She sounded tired when we spoke over the phone and didn’t look much better when she met me at the door. 

“Thanks for coming out here,” she said, rallying a smile for me. “I really appreciate it.”

“Not a problem.”

“You want tea? Coffee?” she asked, turning away into the house and leaving the door open for me behind her. “There are cookies too if you want some.”

She obviously intended me to follow her, but the lack of an explicit invitation stopped me cold. They’d been a family—the strength of the threshold testified to that—and as far as it was concerned, they still were. That was the most hopeful sign I’d seen for them yet. 

“Uhh, coffee would be great,” I said. “But I need you to invite me in.”

“What?” she stopped and turned back around to look at me, hovering on the other side of the threshold.

“Remember I told you not to invite anyone in? Well, that’s still good advice, but I’m going to need you to make an exception for me.”

“Really? Even now?” She peered at the inside of the doorframe as if expecting to see some visible evidence of it.

My first thought was a mildly exasperated, _why wouldn’t it still apply even now_ , but then with a jolt of unhappy sympathy, I realized what she meant by that. She’d been willing to play along before with whatever magic mumbo-jumbo I told her, because her husband was in trouble and it was a state of emergency. Now that things were going back to normal, she’d expected that it would all just go away and she could forget about it.

“Rules are rules,” I said with an apologetic smile and a small shrug. “I _could_ enter without an invitation—I’m not a vampire—but I’d be leaving all my power at the door. Essentially impotent.”

She gave me a ghost of a smile. “Takes a strong man to admit that. Well then, come on in, I guess.” 

The threshold parted and I stepped over it onto the parqueted floor of their hallway, then followed her through the living room and into the kitchen. A handful of the wards were laid out on the kitchen table, newspaper conscientiously spread beneath to keep them from scratching the finish. 

Tabby picked one up with the unconcern of someone who truly had no idea what they were capable of, though she noticed my flinch and put it down a little more circumspectly. “Are they really that dangerous? Jonathan told me they were targeted on only one guy, and he’s dead now.” 

“He is, but there’s a slim chance it could also react to someone of his bloodline. Better safe than sorry.”

She glanced over at me, eyes taking note of the way I stayed well back from them. “Does that mean you?” 

“Not that I know of, but... well, stranger things have happened.”

I talked her through the steps to properly dismantle the ones on the table, I fired up a spell that I’d worked out myself (with Bob’s help) for locating concentrations of thaumaturgical potential. That turned up four more, all cleverly hidden in places where an invader searching the house would be likely to find and trigger them before noticing the danger. 

It was nerve-wracking work, and even Tabby was looking a little pale by the time we finished. I swept the house once more, just to make sure, before tentatively declaring our work done, then took Tabby up on her offer of cookies—apparently a family remedy for times of trouble, one I approved of. 

“So I guess it’s really over, then,” Tabby said at last, her eyes drifting unhappily over the living room as if she expected another unpleasant surprise to pop out at her.

“That’s all of them.” I could tell her that much, at least, though I knew that wasn’t all she was talking about.

I could feel her struggling with herself for a moment and then she asked, with unconvincing nonchalance, “Have you talked to Jonathan recently?” 

“Yeah. There was a trial for the wizard responsible for this,” I answered with a nod toward the ratty little ball of hair sitting on the newspaper. “We were both called in to testify—”

Ah. And suddenly I understood the reason for his unexpected oversharing, why he’d loaded me up with all the words that were on his soul before I went to see Tabby—me, the only emissary he could send that she might listen to. 

_Vampires_ , I thought with an inward sigh.  _Never can quit with their relentless scheming._ I guess some things are just in the blood. I couldn’t begrudge it to him though; you work with what you’ve got.

“He misses you a lot,” I told her quietly. “He knows that he should have told you from the start, and I think he’d do anything to get you back now.”

Tabby gave an odd, bitter twist of a smile. “You mean he should have told me that he was a _sex vampire_?” she asked, practically spitting the words, like she wanted to get them away from her. “It’s ridiculous. It’s all just... it’s _stupid_ and impossible, and I don’t see why I should believe any of it for a moment, except _it makes sense!_

“I knew he was different.” She huffed a bitter laugh. “Like I hadn’t noticed _that_ much. I knew he had a secret, but do you know what I thought it was? You’ll probably think this is stupid, but—” She had to stop, closing her eyes and taking another breath before forcing out her next words. “ I thought that he’d been sexually abused. And that was why he never talked about his family. I mean, all the signs were there—how he would sexualize everything without even thinking about it, without even noticing that he was doing it. He didn’t seem to realize that normal people just don’t think that way. But then when we were together, he was always at such a loss—like he had no idea what he was supposed to do with me. Like whatever had made him see sex in everything hadn’t taught him how to love or even how to touch, and so I assumed that... yeah. 

“I thought that one day, when he was ready to trust me, then he would tell me, and that was why I never pushed him about his family. This, though...” She shook her head, lost and angry and looking on the verge of tears. “This isn’t the secret I was expecting, and _I don’t know what to do with this!_ How am I supposed to deal with the fact that my husband has been lying to me since the day we met? That all this time I thought I _knew_ him, and then it turns out that he’s not what I thought he was at all, he’s not even _human,_ of all ridiculous nonsense! And... and...”

“Mrs. Wi—Tabby,” I said gently, catching her elbow. “He _is_ human. He’s not like the others.” Not in the ways that mattered. “He gave up that life so that he could be with you.”

“So you say, so _he_ says, but how am I supposed to know whether that’s true or not? I don’t understand any of this, all I know is what you people _tell_ me!”

“You need to talk to him,” I said. “Give him a chance to explain himself, and hear him out.”

“But that’s just the thing,” she spat, frustrated. “I don’t want to talk to him. Because when he’s in the room, _I_ _can’t think rationally_ anymore. I can’t hold onto the thoughts in my head, all I want to do is forgive him for everything.” She snorted. “I suppose now I know why.”

“No, listen.” I leaned across the table. “You have to believe me when I say this—you’re not in love with him because he’s an incubus. That’s not the way it works. They can make you _want_ them, sure, but there’s nothing they can do to make you fall in love.”

She sat in rebellious, unhappy silence, but didn’t try to argue. 

“Just talk to him,” I pushed gently. _Give him a chance to remind you that you love him._

The skin around her mouth was white with tension, and a ripple passed over her face as if she would cry. But apparently she wasn’t going to let herself cry in front of a near-stranger, because she took a deep breath, visibly bringing herself under control, and then rose to her feet. 

“Thank you for your help, Mr. Dresden,” she said formally, offering her hand to shake as I stood too. “I really appreciate everything you’ve done for me. For us.”

And that was my cue to get gone. I’d done what I could for them, but the rest of it wasn’t my choice to make, wasn’t for mine to fix. 

 

I left Tabby’s neighborhood, heading vaguely eastward in the direction of home and then turning south when that dead-ended at the water. I hadn’t been aware of any particular destination, but it didn’t feel like an accident when I found myself passing by the stretch of shore where the M.A.G.I.C. practitioners had died. It was fitting, I decided, to go pay my respects at the place where this whole misadventure had begun for me. Where it had ended for seven others. 

It was a cloudy weekday afternoon, still too early in the year to attract many beachgoers, so there was no one on that stretch of shore except a man playing frisbee with his dog in the distance. I parked my car in one of a line of empty parking spots and walked the rest of the way to the crime scene. 

There was no trace of it left, and the police cordons were long gone. The only thing to show for it was a small memorial up at the edge of the beach, where grass was starting to mingle with the sand. It was simple, nothing more than a bronze plaque set into a rough-hewn slab of stone, with an untranslated Latin inscription to make passerby wonder: 

 

_Cineri_ _miseratio_ _sera venit._

 

Or roughly, _Pity paid to ashes comes too late._ Bitter condemnation for the institution that had never found the time to bother with the powerless until the damage was already done.

I sat down at the base of it, leaning my back against the rock and settling in to gaze out across the lake. I trusted that any unquiet souls hanging around this spot wouldn’t begrudge me a moment to do some thinking, since the dead tend to be more binary in their view of justice than the living, and I had indirectly been the one to avenge them. 

The shore was pretty here, as the dappled clouds overhead filtered patchy sunlight down over sand and water. The wind, strong as it rolled in off the lake, swallowed up the noise of the city and lent it an isolated, almost lonely feel. I might have been alone in the world except for the distant, disconnected sounds of traffic that reached me, batted about by the wind. 

I let my eyes close and leaned my head back, the rock cool against my scalp, the sunlight warming my face. 

My mind felt over-full, busy with competing worries. Thoughts of Jonathan and Tabby and their unresolved heartache. Thoughts of the White Council and enemies lurking in plain sight. There wasn’t anything I could do about them either except wait, and hope for luck. 

And, of course, thoughts of Marcone—of the great question mark that hung over us, the big _what happens now_ that I still had no answer for. It had been there in the back of my mind while I went about my other business, unspoken but still shaping my feelings, guiding my actions, tied up inextricably with my desire to _make things right_ between Tabby and Jonathan, because by god, I might not be able to get what I wanted, but surely _someone_ deserved to.

_Talk to him,_ I’d told Tabby.

Maybe I should have been taking my own advice. I hadn’t spoken with Marcone since that last morning on the boat, and while I had a pretty good idea that he’d been avoiding me, I suspected it had more to do with giving me space than trying to get rid of me. After all, he’d told me point blank that it wouldn’t be over until I ended it. 

Well, this was the test that we’d known was coming, right? To see whether this fragile, improbable thing that had sprung up between us could last when transplanted out of the stolen alliance we’d built, whether it could survive being thrust, all unprepared, back into the real world. We’d never been lovers here before; we’d never even been friends, not in any conventional sense of the word. 

Murphy hadn’t been entirely off the mark when she voiced her concerns about him—there  _was_ a reason we hadn’t been friends before. And in a real sense, things were no different from how they’d ever been. It wasn’t as if I’d learned something about him that had changed my mind—I’d already known everything that he was, the good and the bad. Maybe it’s that I was finally learning how to reconcile the two, to understand that one man can be both, to accept that the good doesn’t excuse the bad, but the bad doesn’t negate the good either.

I’d always wanted morality to be simple. To believe that good people did good things, and evil people did evil things, and that everyone could be put into neat little boxes. Easy bookkeeping. 

Only it wasn’t that simple, and it hadn’t been for a long time. I’d seen far too much in the intervening years to sustain any belief in binaries of good and evil. I wasn’t the man that I’d been when I first locked eyes with Marcone and got a taste of his soul. Maybe he wasn’t the man he’d been then either. Since then I’d seen basically good people make decisions that were logical, considered, and entirely immoral. I’d made some myself. And I had also seen people that I’d thought were irredeemably evil surprise me with acts of senseless charity. 

Like Attenborough. Had he been a villain whose goal of stopping the Black Council only happened to coincide with mine—or a good man who simply took things too far? I wasn’t sure where to draw the line. Or whether there was even a line to be drawn. 

I didn’t know where to draw the line with Marcone either. I wasn’t comfortable with a lot of the things he did, and I didn’t want to  _get_ comfortable with them. He was relentlessly pragmatic, calculating acceptable losses and taking collateral damage in stride; I was an idealist, always looking for a way to save everyone. He didn’t tilt at windmills, and I couldn’t stop.

_This will be over when you end it._

When he eventually, inevitably did something I couldn’t forgive him for? He’d grudgingly spared Helen, but I hadn’t forgotten his final words:  _Don’t expect such easy capitulation in the future._ Reminding me that he was, and always would be, a man capable of murder. That sooner or later there would be a Helen he wouldn’t suffer to live, not even if I asked him to. Would that be the end of it, then? Was anything we made for ourselves in the interim on borrowed time?

I thought about what I’d said to Molly, my fatalistic prediction about the success of a relationship with Marcone—honestly, how long _could_ it last once things were back to normal, when under “normal” circumstances there was an ideological chasm between us? Her retort— _I can’t decide if that’s stupid, or tragic, or both—_ had rolled off me because she was still so young, young enough to believe that true love could conquer all. She didn’t have the years or the experiences to realize that sometimes it just doesn’t. That sometimes love, even true love, has to yield to cold hard reality. 

_That’s life,_ I’d told her. I would know; I’d learned it the hard way.

And it’s true—that is life. Sometimes tragic, often stupid, but also full of joy and beauty and love for people brave enough to ask for it. It reminded me of that old line about “better to have loved and lost.” I couldn’t speak for anyone else, but I knew, without needing even a moment’s thought, that given all my choices to make again, I wouldn’t give up the happiness I’d shared with Elaine, and then with Susan, in order to spare myself the heartbreak that followed. And I wouldn’t do it with Marcone either. 

Maybe we couldn’t keep life from being tragic. Maybe Marcone would die tomorrow, or maybe I would. Maybe it was only a matter of time before he did something that I couldn’t forgive him for, but was that any excuse for giving up without giving it a chance? Maybe it really was just as simple as I’d put it to Murphy—that I didn’t need her permission, or anyone’s, to live and love the way I wanted to. 

Which was when it occurred to me that I’d essentially made up my mind already; I was just the last person to notice. What else do you call coming out to your nearest and dearest about dating John Marcone, if not commitment? I’d told Ebenezar, told Murphy, and while I hadn’t exactly been anticipating any meltdowns, there had always been the off-chance that Eb would disinherit me (or whatever it is you do with cocky young wizards who aren’t your actual heir), or that Murphy would blacklist me for sleeping with the enemy. But I’d told them anyway, prepared to deal with the fallout, if it happened. 

The only person I hadn’t told was Marcone. 

In the beginning I’d said  _no_ . Then I’d said,  _Maybe_ . Then,  _For now._ But I couldn’t remember if I’d ever just said  _yes_ . Yes, this is what I want.  _You_ are what I want. Yes, I’m brave enough to take a chance on this. Yes, you’re worth it.

I knew what I needed to do. 

 

I was half-expecting my momentum to fail me before I actually got there, but surprisingly enough it didn’t, and fifteen minutes later I was standing in front of the reception desk at Executive Priority, talking to the same brunette who had taken me to see Helen on that fateful day, and trying to be less of an asshole this time. 

“Howdy,” I said affably. It was probably too little and too late to make up for first impressions, but a little politeness never hurt. “Is Marcone in?”

“Yes sir, he’s upstairs.” She sounded so happy to be able to give me that good news. “Would you like me to call and see if he’s available?”

“Nah, I’ll surprise him. You know how he loves surprises.”

Her smile slipped. “Yes sir, but I believe he’s busy right now...” 

“He’s always busy, but he’ll make time for me.” He always did, and maybe I wasn’t the hotshot detective that I liked to think I was, if it had taken me this long to figure out why.

Her expression said, _It’s your funeral,_ but all her lips said was, “Very good, sir. Right this way.”

Well, Marcone was certainly back to business as usual, it seemed. I knew that he’d finished getting his name cleared—I’d been visiting Ebenezar at the time, but Murphy had told me about it afterward. He’d showed up at the station with a phalanx of lawyers, and the police hadn’t even been able to keep him overnight, not without any evidence that a crime had been committed in the first place. The tabloids had an absolute  _field day_ when they got wind of that, because no one in the CPD could satisfactorily explain why they’d suddenly dropped the murder charges against John Marcone, and the conclusion that every logical person jumped to was that he’d bought his way out of it somehow.

The brunette escorted me to the elevators, as usual, but then unlike the previous times I’d been here, she pushed the button for the top floor instead of the third. 

_That’s different_ , I thought absently, my mind elsewhere, and didn’t realize how different until the doors chimed and parted to reveal a pair of very burly thugs caught in the moment of being surprised—where “surprised” meant simultaneously reaching for guns and turning around to see who had been unwise enough to surprise them.

You know, come to think of it, I didn’t actually have to talk to him _right now_.

“Here we are, Mr. Dresden,” the girl said brightly. She had been smart enough to stay on one side of the elevator, out of anyone’s line of fire, and was somehow managing to keep any hint of _I told you so_ out of her immaculately professional smile. “Enjoy your surprise.”

I’d ignored her tactful hints—and Harry Dresden protocol in the training manual says to give that idiot whatever he asks for—so here I was, with a handful of unfamiliar thugs looming up on me like I’d just made their day more interesting with my arrival, and they wanted to return the favor. I don’t think I’d ever been happier to see Hendricks. 

The two at the elevator reluctantly parted to allow Hendricks, who took one look at me and holstered his gun, resigned to the fact that he was still not allowed to shoot me. “It’s Dresden,” he rumbled back, and then lifted his eyes to shoot me a _Well, come on then_ look.

Shoving my hands in my pockets and going for “insouciant,” as though strolling through a gauntlet of armed thugs was something I did every day, I followed Hendricks through the wide atrium. 

The ceiling was high and vaulted, made entirely of glass and tinted like sunshades, reducing the hard glare of the afternoon sun from blinding to merely bright. The floor was broad and open to enhance the impression of space and light, and sunk in the center was a totally gratuitous fountain, surrounded by greenery and filling the room with the pleasant, expensive ambient noise of running water. Oh, ye who say that crime does not pay—methinks you’re doing it wrong. 

Hendricks led me around the miniature rainforest, past an immaculate bar where a lone, pencil-thin female bartender stood idly polishing bottles, the rows of varicolored liquors behind her catching the light like stained glass, over to a handful of tables arrayed informally before the wall of windows. Only one was occupied, Marcone sitting across from two strangers, while the rest stood empty like a hotel bar during the mid-afternoon lull. 

Marcone rose as we approached, a wide, easy smile on his face as he sauntered over to greet me. 

“Mr. Dresden,” he said warmly, mischief in his eye as he clasped my hand like an old friend. “I’m glad you could make it. Please, have a seat.”

I swear, that man either had Dresden-radar or a seriously under-appreciated talent for improv. Or else  _every_ plan of his included a contingency for being gatecrashed by scruffy wizards, which wasn’t necessarily flattering.

“You are too kind,” I said dryly. “ _Really_.”

I did take a seat though, across from two politician-looking types who I felt I ought to recognize from the newspaper or something. They both looked as if my arrival had thrown them off their game, and were now fidgeting in their seats like kids waiting to be dismissed from the dinner table. 

Marcone ignored them both, settling into, his chair and signaling the bartender to bring me a drink. I knew there was no way he was actually drunk, but he was putting on a good show of a man relaxed after a few drinks, his posture loose and expansive, his smile less sharklike than usual. 

“So, what brings you to my side of town?” he asked, leaning back and crossing his legs to rest his ankle against his knee.

As if every side weren’t his side of town. 

I met his casual tone and shrugged. “I was in the neighborhood. Thought I’d drop by and offer my congratulations on using your get-out-of-jail-free card.” 

“Indeed. I couldn’t have done it without you,” Marcone agreed, sounding terribly pleased with himself.

“You know, you’re what’s wrong with the American criminal justice system,” I informed him.

“Oh?”

“ ‘Mob Boss Gets Away With Murder.’ ‘Chicago Corruption Hits New Low.’ It says so on the internet; it must be true.”

He laughed, deep and rich. “Oh dear, people on the internet don’t like me,” he said, still chuckling. “How _ever_ will I console myself?” 

“With fast cars and supermodels, I suppose.”

“Cliched.” He brushed the suggestion away with a dismissive wave. “So what can I do for you on this fine day?”

“Well, I just stopped by to... chat.” My eyes cut briefly to his two associates; he still hadn’t introduced them, which could be either protecting their privacy or some sort of mind game. From the uncomfortable, we’re-being-ignored-what-do-we-do-now looks on their faces, I was guessing it was the latter. “But if you’re busy, I could come back later.”

His gaze sharpened, and no, he wasn’t drunk at all. “Not at all,” he said easily, glancing over at his pet politicians. “We were just finishing here, weren’t we, gentlemen?” 

From their stammer-stop agreement, it was obvious that _now_ they were. The bartender brought me a frosted, icy-cold glass of beer while they got up to leave and I was happy to concentrate on that while Marcone saw them off to the elevator, their conversation thick with veiled allusions to things I probably didn’t want to know about. 

The other voices gradually fell away to silence, and a few moments later I heard Marcone’s footsteps returning over the patter of the fountain. I looked up in time to see him slide into the chair next to me and draw it up to the table. 

“Alright, so that’s taken care of,” he said, balling up a cocktail napkin and dropping it in an empty glass. His previous show of informality was gone, discarded like other men would shed a coat. “I admit, when I didn’t hear from your sooner, I’d begun to think that our last discussion had perhaps frightened you off.”

I put my feet up on one of the empty seats that his erstwhile associates had vacated. “Like you could get rid of me that easily.” 

He gave me a practiced smile, lacing his fingers in his lap. “Indeed. So was there a matter you wanted to discuss, or was this merely a clever ruse to get free drinks?” 

There was something off-putting about his manner, a deliberate distance he was maintaining even though we were alone now. For an uncertain moment I wondered if perhaps he hadn’t thought the better of a relationship with me after all, and was subtly trying to communicate that sentiment. Then the answer hit me like a bag of bricks landing on my head. 

He wasn’t breaking up with me. He thought  _I’d_ come here to break up with  _him._

And since it wasn’t his style to beg or bully or pitch a fit, he was steeling himself to take it gracefully, to maintain his stately dignity in the face of rejection. In retrospect, I could see how a week and a half of radio silence followed by barging in and “wanting to chat” might sound all kinds of ominous.

And so, wanting to put  _that_ idea to rest once and for all, I leaned over to close the distance between us and kissed him. 

I knew I’d read him right, because he stiffened with initial surprise before I felt his lips curl into a smile, and he lifted a hand to touch my jaw so he could kiss me properly. 

We’d had a lot of first kisses along the way, landmarks in the changing terrain between us, and this was another—our first kiss in the real world, so to speak. And the angle was awkward, lips not fitting quite right and me about to overbalance, but here we were, kissing on the top floor of his office with Chicago spread out before us like a promise. 

He released me when I drew back, his hand sliding down my shoulder before he let me go, his expression gone thoughtful and speculative. 

“I want to give it a try,” I said, all in a rush, trying to get it out before what I was saying really registered and embarrassment caught up with me.

He raised a brow. “‘It’...?” 

I rolled my eyes. “Come on, you know what I mean.  _It._ You and me. Do I have to draw a diagram?”

Indulgent smile. “I merely wanted to make certain that we were on the same page.” 

“Pages, right,” I said. Speaking of... “Marcone—about what happened on the island, with Catelyn.”

“Ah,” he said, short and significant, leaning back and folding his arms. “We don’t have to talk about that, you know.”

“What, you think I _want_ to?” I retorted. “But we can’t just pretend like it didn’t happen.”

“Yes, I rather think we can. Dresden—” He paused, his eyes moving to the window and narrowing as though something out there had offended him. “In the world that I come from, people are allowed the privacy of their own emotions, and allowed the discretion to choose when, if at all, we confide them. That was not information I would have chosen to burden you with at this early stage, and I admit I’m quite vexed with the Borlais woman for having gone and taken the choice away from me. So as far as I’m concerned, I _haven’t_ made any such declarations and you’re under no obligation to respond as if I had.”

I could see his point. I’d already known he was a deeply private man, and I understood how much it must rankle him not to be allowed such privacy, but... “But I do know, now. I can’t un-remember it.” 

“True,” he allowed. “But I see no reason why you ought to change your behavior to accommodate for it. Frankly, I don’t know what I would _do_ with you if you ceased being your uniquely abrasive self. Flowers and chocolate, solicitude and sweet nothings? Mr. Dresden, I would call security on you.”

That startled a laugh from me, and I raised my hands in surrender. “Alright, fine—no singing telegrams for you, then. And I swear, we never have to have this conversation again, but...” I stopped, swallowed hard. “But I have to make sure we’re on the same page, and... okay, here it is: I like you a lot. I do. And I want be with you. I want to see where this goes. But,” I forced myself to say it, “I’m not _in love_ with you.” I knew it was the coward’s route to keep my eyes glued on the table but I was taking it anyway, because I couldn’t bring myself to look him in the face. “Not—not like that” 

Not in the way that the White Court defined it, not in the way that he was in love with me. And maybe it was only a  _not yet—_ but it could also be a  _not ever_ , and as much I didn’t want to be telling him this, he had to know. 

“Harry,” Marcone said patiently, and when I ventured to look up, he was giving me his patented, dealing-with-Harry-Dresden look. “This hardly comes as a surprise. After all, until just recently you had invested a great deal of energy into loathing me.”

I blinked. For all my introspection, I hadn’t thought of it that way. 

“Besides,” he continued, sounding entirely undismayed as he rose to his feet and offered me a hand. “That has a way of changing.”

“Oh?” I asked, amused despite myself by his confidence. 

I took the proffered hand and let him pull me up. We were standing close now, my hip leaning into his, closer than I was really used to or comfortable with yet, in this world. All of a sudden we were playing for keeps—when the things we said and did could have repercussions, could change the course of our lives. 

“Yes indeed,” he said easily. “There’s a reason why we talk about _falling_ in love. I have faith that I can trip you yet.”

And as I looked at him, at the fond, unexpectedly gentle light in his eyes and feeling an answering curl of warmth in my chest, I thought that perhaps he just might. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And that's it! A great many thanks to Binz, Grenegome, and My Roommate for being friends and betas, and thank you to everyone who stayed with me this far. :) I've no plans to write more Dresden Files fic, but here are some things that may be of interest:
> 
> \- [Deleted scenes](http://rassaku.livejournal.com/9864.html) from Enemy Mine  
> \- The [outline/ideas/dialogue](http://rassaku.livejournal.com/10065.html) from a young-punk-Marcone-meets-Harry fic that I was amusing myself with.  
> \- Two thinky-posts, the aforementioned discussion on sexism [in the Dresden books](http://rassaku.livejournal.com/6334.html) and another one on ways [of structuring a romance](http://rassaku.livejournal.com/8603.html).


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